Abstract
Beyond an analysis of gene function at the genome level, the ultimate goal of functional genomics is to understand the organisation and coordinated operation of the cell. Integration of data and information is an essential feature of all the steps leading from the production of experimental results to the modelling of a complete cell. The Geneva workshop, organised within the framework of the European Science Foundation (ESF) Programme on Integrated Approaches for Functional Genomics (http://www.functionalgenomics.org.uk), provided an excellent opportunity to review the issue of data integration from various perspectives. It brought together scientists with different backgrounds (biologists, bioinformaticians), who currently participate in consortia involving or requiring the integration of heterogeneous biological data. The workshop dedicated equal time to presentations and discussions in order to optimise knowledge distribution and sharing. The first session was devoted to existing functional genomics projects, where diverse sets of experimental approaches are applied to a model organism or given project. For these, both the scientific objectives and data management strategies were described. Another set of presentations focused on ‘data integration requirements’ in proteomics. In this rapidly evolving area, data integration is a key issue for technological developments that are being carried out in both academic and industrial contexts. Data integration approaches were then presented by scientists involved in the design and maintenance of public database resources. The last session was devoted to bioinformatics and gave an overview of state of the art approaches for building up information systems with good capabilities with respect to data integration. The workshop concluded with an open discussion on bottlenecks and perspectives that emerged from the presentations. As a number of speakers have submitted reviews based on their presentations that are appearing in this issue of CFG and in the next one, in this report Comparative and Functional Genomics Comp Funct Genom 2002; 3: 16–21. DOI: 10.1002 / cfg.134
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