ITR: An Active, Personalized, Adaptive, Multi-format Biological Information Delivery System

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

The explosive growth of biological information sources, available over the Internet, has given rise to both opportunities and challenges for biological and medical researchers. The opportunities they provide are both scientific (e.g., understanding the information encoded in elementary biological structures) as well as technological (e.g., new drug discovery). The challenges, on the other hand, lie in how to efficiently discover, among the vast volume of information, the items that are relevant or interesting to a given researcher. The objective of the proposed research is to investigate related basic research problems and develop a biological information delivery system in a collaborative project between computer scientists, information scientists, and biological researchers. The specific plans include developing methods to make the proposed system pro-active (surveying evolving on-line sources for relevant information), personalized (cognizant of a particular researcher's interests), adaptive (able to react to changes in the information sources as well as user interests or objectives), and capable of integrating multi-format data. The impact of this research is a significant enhancement in the ability of students and researchers in biological sciences to efficiently utilize on-line resources, while generating methods for computerized analysis of biological data and providing computerized support for new scientific discovery.