World Congress on Cellular and Molecular Biology (CMB 2005)

Poitiers, France 7-12 Oct 2005

Symposium: Bioinformatics innovations in molecular and cellular biology

Chair and symposium organizer:

Gertraud Burger

Biological databases and knowledge representation (Gertraud Burger)

Published biological data are deposited in dispersed locations (journal publications, public repositories, personal web sites), and generally presented in inconsistent fashion, which makes data collection for comprehensive analyses a cumbersome task. In recognition of this problem, expert biologists are constructing specialized databases to collate, organize, standardize and validate data of a given field. However, data modeling and database design for Life Science applications is non-trivial, due to the irregularity or ‘messiness’ of biological data. Another level of complication comes from the aim of sharing biological data between different research disciplines, because each discipline has its own terminology and perspective. The value of specialized databases and generalized knowledge representation systems in the analysis of biological data will be discussed.