Abstract. Life Science research faces the constant challenge of how to effectively handle an ever-growing body of bioinformatics software and online resources. The users and developers of bioinformatics resources have a diverse set of competing demands on how these resources need to be developed and organised. Unfortunately, there does not exist an adequate community-wide framework to integrate such competing demands. The problems that arise from this include unstructured standards development, the emergence of tools that do not meet specific needs of researchers, and often times a communications gap between those who use the tools and those who supply them. This paper presents an overview of the different functions and needs of bioinformatics stakeholders to determine what may be required in a community-wide framework. A Bioinformatics Reference Model is proposed as a basis for such a framework. The reference model outlines the functional relationship between research usage and technical aspects of bioinformatics resources. It separates important functions into multiple structured layers, clarifies how they relate to each other, and highlights the gaps that need to be addressed for progress towards a diverse, manageable, and sustainable body of resources. The relevance of this reference model to the bioscience research community, and its implications in progress for organising our bioinformatics resources, are discussed.
We have implemented a client/server system called ORBIT (Online Researcher's Bioinformatics Interface Tools) where individual clients can have interfaces created and customized to command-line-driven, server-side programs. Thus, Internet-based interfaces can be tailored to a user's specific bioinformatic needs. As interfaces are created on the client machine independent of the server, there can be different interfaces to the same server-side program to cater for different parameter settings. The interface customization is relatively quick (between 10 and 60 min) and all client interfaces are integrated into a single modular environment which will run on any computer platform supporting Java. The system has been developed to allow for a number of future enhancements and features. ORBIT represents an important advance in the way researchers gain access to bioinformatics tools on the Internet.
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