Chapter 9 - Knowledge Integration: In Silico Experiments in Bioinformatics

Abstract

Biologists, aided by bioinformaticians, have become knowledge workers, intelligently weaving together the information available to the community, linking and correlating it meaningfully, and generating even more information. Many bio-Grid projects focus on the sharing of computational resources, large scale data movement and replication for simulations, remote instrumentation steerage, high-throughput sequence analysis, or image processing, as in the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) project. However, much of bioinformatics involves a scientific process with relatively modest computational needs but significant semantic and data complexity. The myGrid project is building high-level services for integrating applications and data resources, concentrating on dynamic resource discovery, workflow specification and dynamic enactment, and distributed query processing. These services merely enable experiments to be formed and executed. Thus, myGrid's second category of services supports the scientific method and best practice found at the bench but often neglected at the workstation, specifically provenance management, change notification, and personalization.