BRINet: A BioResource Integration Network

Hoy, J.E.S., McCulloch, A.F. and McDonald, J.R.

Addressing queries interactively to a chain of two or more biological resources is an everyday task for many scientists, as they use in-silico methods to characterize a biological feature of interest. In this paper, we present BRINet: a software platform which provides a general, extensible framework allowing biologists to retrieve information from a complex network of resources, by specifying only the type of the input, and the type of the desired output. The core data structure is the semantic routing table, which is implemented as a sparse adjacency matrix of directly connected semantic nodes. Each entry of this matrix contains a reference to an operation driver that can execute the hop between two specific nodes, and this approach of creating purpose built drivers allows the integration of any number of heterogenous resources. This is combined with a novel semantic routing algorithm, which calculates every possible retrieval strategy between any two types, facilitating route discovery. The result is a compact package that automates the complex, and often monotonous task of navigating through a wide range of disparate resources in search of desired information.

Cite as: Hoy, J.E.S., McCulloch, A.F. and McDonald, J.R. (2004). BRINet: A BioResource Integration Network. In Proc. Second Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (APBC2004), Dunedin, New Zealand. CRPIT, 29. Chen, Y.-P. P., Ed. ACS. 29-34.

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