Science is a form of distributed analysis involving both individual work that produces new knowledge and collaborative work to exchange information with the larger community. There are many particular ways in which individual and community can interact in science, and it is difficult to assess how efficient these are, and what the best way might be to support them. This paper reports on a series of experiments in this area and a prototype implementation using a research platform called CACHE.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: As biologists increasingly rely upon computational tools, it is imperative that they be able to appropriately apply these tools and clearly understand the methods the tools employ. Such tools must have access to all the relevant data and knowledge and, in some sense, "understand" biology so that they can serve biologists' goals appropriately and "explain" in biological terms how results are computed.
Methodology/principal Findings: We describe a deduction-based approach to biocomputation that semiautomatically combines knowledge, software, and data to satisfy goals expressed in a high-level biological language.
Unlabelled: BioLingua is an interactive, web-based programming environment that enables biologists to analyze biological systems by combining knowledge and data through direct end-user programming. BioLingua embeds a mature symbolic programming language in a frame-based knowledge environment, integrating genomic and pathway knowledge about a class of similar organisms. The BioLingua language provides interfaces to numerous state-of-the-art bioinformatic tools, making these available as an integrated package through the novel use of web-based programmability and an integrated Wiki-based community code and data store.
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