Challenges storing and representing biomedical data

Abstract

The scientific achievements coming from molecular biology depend greatly on the capability of computational applications to manage and explore laboratorial results. One component that is commonly underrated is the need for proper user interfaces that allow researchers to visually explore the results and extract biological evidences. In this paper, we review the main challenges of dealing with complex biomedical datasets, namely regarding data storing, communicating, representing and visualizing biomedical experimental data. We emphasize the need for proper human computer interaction paradigms and underlying data management architectures in order to achieve a correct interpretation of the experimental results. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin.