ITS
Information Technology Services
Information Technology Services of the Advanced Bioinformatics Core (ABC) aims at providing effective information integration services for disease research in NRPGM, other cores in NRPGM, and worldwide biomedical community. To serve this purpose, a “common informatics platform” will be established and maintained. On top of this platform, bioinformatics services will be “wrapped” as reusable modules that can be easily connected with other modules to form an analysis pipeline. Web services and grid computing will be applied to wrap these services,but a unique feature of this platform is that end users (i.e., biomedical researchers) can wrap any services that they can access through a Web interface using a software tool called “Agent Toolbox” developed previously by this PI to integrate the wrapped services with other reusable modules. This feature is proved to be particularly useful for exploring speculative hypotheses in comparative studies. The proposed common informatics platform has two important qualities. First, it is simple. Rather than relying on a complex architecture, this platform simply provides an easy-to-use user interface for end users and adopts widely used technological standards (i.e., the Web standards) so that developers can easily wrap existing services to achieve interoperability. Second, it is loose. This platform does not impose any strict or exclusive requirement and therefore can accommodate existing bioinformatics services. Therefore, users can access, integrate and share existing resources and newly created resources in a uniform manner on this platform. As the platform increasingly integrates more resources, an ontological-based knowledge management system will be applied to facilitate qualitative reasoning of biological pathways. Three types of services: creating new resources, information integration, and infrastructure will be provided to serve the needs of the researchers in the study of cancer, heritable diseases, and infectious diseases, initially. The service model will be extended and duplicated and extended to worldwide biomedical community in the future. The specific aims of this component project are:
1. Design, develop and maintain a common informatics platform for Bioinformatics information integration that includes a core service portal, metadata center and project management facilities.
2. Enhance and tailor the Web wrapper agent technology developed at Institute of Information Science (IIS), Academia Sinica to serve NRPGM.
3. Scale up and improve existing SNP selection services and develop new services to serve NRPGM.