Agent-Oriented Data Curation in Bioinformatics

Miles, S. (2006) Agent-Oriented Data Curation in Bioinformatics. Multi-Agent and Grid Systems . (In Press)

Download

Preview

PDF
165Kb

Abstract

The practitioners of bioinformatics require increasing sophistication
from their software tools to take into account the particular characteristics
that make their domain complex. For example, there is a great
variation of experience of researchers, from novices who would like guidance
from experts in the best resources to use to experts that wish to take
greater management control of the tools used in their experiments. Also,
the range of available, and conflicting, data formats is growing and there
is a desire to automate the many trivial manual stages of in-silico experiments.
Agent-oriented software development is one approach to tackling
the design of complex applications. In this paper, we argue that, in fact,
agent-oriented development is a particularly well-suited approach to developing
bioinformatics tools that take into account the wider domain
characteristics. To illustrate this, we design a data curation tool, which
manages the format of experimental data, extend it to better account for
the extra requirements placed by the domain characteristics, and show
how the characteristics lead to a system well suited to an agent-oriented
view.