3) Projects

Integrated Data Management (S3DB) and Analysis (BiS)

The various projects at IBL rely on the articulation between two infrastructure resources. One is a semantic database where arbitrary data structures can be stored and managed. This work was described in two reports in Nature Biotech: the rationale at 2005 Sep; 23(9):1099-103, and teh application at 2006 Sep, 24(9):1070-1071. The prototype application, S3DB, is now in use by several experimental groups. The second resource is a code distribution tool that synchronizes client machines with a data analysis environment maintained in a central repository of applicatrions. This tool is designated as Bioinformatics Station (BiS) and, just like S3DB, its analytical modules are made publicly avaiable with open source.

The various projects at IBL are therefore pursued as interoperable modules of a common infrastructure. Most of them rely of collaborations with extramural research groups for theory development, algorithm identification and to a lesser degree application deployment. This creates a de facto distributed research group for which IBL is a front end. For more information about the research work leading to the individual modules of BiS please see www.MathBiol.org.