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Keywords
Biodata, Genetics, Software engineering, Application generators
Abstract
Bioinformatics projects are currently under way at numerous universities and in industry. These projects typically involve processing large amounts of biological data and comparison of biological signals or sequences. Much of the existing work in bioinformatics software is based on such languages and platforms as Perl and Unix. This paper, proposes software architectures in Java to support biological applications allowing access of biological data using server-side Java programs on the Internet. The architecture follows the standards of unified modeling language (UML). UML architecture diagrams are presented for the Java-based bioinformatics applications. In addition, an overview of the Bio-Soft project under way at The Biomedical Research Institute (BRI) of the University of Wisconsin-Parkside is provided, which includes research and instructional software for bioinformatics applications.
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1. Introduction
Bioinformadcs is a new and rapidly evolving discipline that combines several diverse fields such as biology, computer science and information technology. The Human Genome project and related advances in technology have produced terabytes of data that can be used to advance fields such as medicine. The huge amount of data produced by bioinformatics related projects is currently stored in highly complex, heterogeneous and geographically distributed databases. Services to access these databases are also heterogeneous in nature. In this paper, we describe bioinformatics services that are being built at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside to enable users to effectively and efficiently access bioinformatics data.
These bioinformatics applications have been developed using business models. Electronic marketplaces are becoming increasingly important for businesses as well as consumers. As an increasing number of companies use the Internet for business-critical processes, an extensive amount of research is being done to evaluate different Web-based architectures for Internet based computing. Businesses prefer electronic commerce (or e-commerce) because of the inherent advantages such as increased efficiency and reduced costs associated with selling products, while the consumers are attracted by the ease of shopping using the Internet, ability to search among different brands and products in less time and reduction in the overall costs.
Bioinformatics applications can be thought of as Business-to-Consumer (B2C) or...