Knowledge discovery portal for biomedical research

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The life sciences community is overwhelmed by an unprecedented growth of information and knowledge integration solutions are needed in all areas of biomedical research. This need has been emphasized in the context of drug discovery process, where integration of data from high throughput modern experimental platforms brings the promise of accelerating the drug development. A major problem is the heterogeneous, distributed, and dynamic nature of life sciences data sources. The aim of the proposed research is to develop novel, flexible methodology and software tools for construction of a knowledge integration portals for biomedical research. Building on the emerging technologies for the distributed computing (Web services) and open data standards based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language), IAC will develop Web-based software architecture for integration of diverse types of distributed data sources. The proposed system is designed to meet unique requirements of the biomedical research. It provides semantic integration of the information, employs large variety of native data formats, uses pre-existing query capabilities of data sources, and enables access to a large, dynamically changing collection of autonomous data sources. The prototype implementation of the portal will be for integration of knowledge on toxicity of chemical compounds.