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Component-centric approach dominates the field of biological research today. Getting to the next level in biological understanding requires a transition from the component-centric to a system-centric research approach.
Here it becomes crucial to combine biology with the information of the fields of mathematics, physics and computer sciences.
Data derived from literature and previous experiments describing biological systems and their subsystems form the basis for constructing mathematical models. These models are used to derive new hypotheses revealing properties and functions of these systems as well as their relations. The hypotheses can be examined and validated with in silico and wet lab experiments for knowledge build-up of biological processes.
In knowledge management terms, information is data which has been given meaning with context.
The number of new biological research methods is growing rapidly. The ’omics’ based high throughput methods account for a large part of this growth. To bring out the full value of biological primary datasets from diverse data domains, such as genes, transcripts and proteins, large amounts of other biological data from many data domains has been integrated into the database in a coherent way to provide useful context.
Data derived from literature and previous experiments describing biological systems and their subsystems form the basis for constructing mathematical models. These models are used to derive new hypotheses revealing properties and functions of these systems as well as their relations. The hypotheses can be examined and validated with in silico and wet lab experiments for knowledge build-up of biological processes.
In knowledge management terms, information is data which has been given meaning with context.
The number of new biological research methods is growing rapidly. The ’omics’ based high throughput methods account for a large part of this growth. To bring out the full value of biological primary datasets from diverse data domains, such as genes, transcripts and proteins, large amounts of other biological data from many data domains has been integrated into the database in a coherent way to provide useful context.
The integration of different data classes requires a comprehensive solution to describe the data structure.
The data warehouse structure of Medicel Integrator and the database schema organizing its content are described in more detail in the following subsections.
