A Knowledge Based Interface for Distributed Biological Databases

In more than one decade, genomic research produced a huge amount of experimental data. Although these data are usually freely available on the WWW, accessing them in a consistent and fruitful way is not always an easy task. The lack of sufficiently flexible and, at the same time, semantically precise, but also highly interactive and cooperative, user interfaces is one of the main causes of this problem. A second problem lies in the difficulty of simultaneously and uniformly accessing different databases. The present paper tackles the two issues by: (i) presenting a semantics driven visual interface for querying genomic and protein databases; the interface is capable to support non-expert users, by exploiting knowledge-based reasoning capabilities; (ii) proposing a preliminary software agents based architecture for integrating different databases by using wrappers and mediators, so that the visual interface of point (i) can be easily extended to multiple, distributed, syntactically heterogenous databases