{ 2007 02 24 }

BIRD can fly

bird.jpg

Apart from a number of the PROFIT and FP7 proposals, this week was a quite an important one for an initiative, we were working for a while. Together with my colleagues and friends, Mariano Rico (UAM) and Paco García Sanchez (UM), two great and very promisingresearchers, we submitted our paper about the Biomedical Information Integration and Discovery with Semantic Web Services (BIRD), a platform to locate and integrate biomedical information from various sources.

Here comes the abstract of the paper:

“Biomedical research is now information intensive; the volume and
diversity of new data sources challenges current database
technologies. The development and tuning of database technologies
for biology and medicine will maintain and accelerate the current
pace for innovation and discovery. New promising application
fields such as the Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services can
leverage the potential of biomedical information integration and
discovery, facing the problem of semantic heterogeneity of
biomedical information sources in a variety of storage and data
formats widely distributed both across the Internet and within
individual organizations. In this paper, we present BIRD, a
fully-fledged biomedical information integration solution that
combines natural language analysis and semantically-empowered
techniques to ascertain how the user needs can be best fit. Our
approach is backed with a proof-of-concept implementation where
the breakthrough and efficiency of integrating the biomedical
publications database PubMed, the Database of Interacting Proteins
(DIP) and the Munich Information Center for Protein Sequences
(MIPS) has been tested.”

I think BIRD is a very good idea. Since its inception, it addresses a key need of biomedical researchers: interoperation among the very different information sources such as genes, proteins and micro-array data that need to be gathered all over the Web. Let´s hope the article outcomes into a succesful proposal to make it happen at a higher level.

Posted by jmgomez on Saturday, February 24th, 2007, at 5:52 am, and filed under Bioinformatics.

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