A problem-driven approach for building a bioinformatics GraphDB

Abstract

The development of high throughput technology in biological and medical domains has seen a growing intervention of informatics support. Indeed, the big amount of data produced is difficult to analyse and interpret in terms of time consuming and number of different resources used. In this context, the challenge would be to have an integrated and multi component database with a user friendly interface able to solve biological problems without a priori high-level of bioinformatics knowledge. This need arises from the evidence that biologists have multi-task and multi-levels problems to solve. To this aim, we propose a bottom-up, graph-based approach for integrating bioinformatics resources, usually databases, starting from typical biological scenarios, in order to solve novel bioinformatics problems. The integrated resources can be queried by means of a graph traversal language such as Gremlin.