Metrics based quality assessment for retrieval ability of web-based bioinformatics tools

Abstract

Today, there is need for share and building resources that could be made available around the world any where, at any time. This made the necessity of web for which the usage and utilization depends on those who set these resources for sharing globally. Web based tool with the conceptual view of resource sharing it could be a classification of tool that only extracts resources from the web, like extraction of informatics from the database that would require which would be a thousand of thousands of object entities that would relay on this real world for which the resource is left for sharing globally. Bioinformatics tools aims at the same which is used for solving real world problems using DNA and amino acid sequences and related information using mathematical, statistical and computing methods. Mostly of the tools of this area are web-based since biological resources are real entity that should be kept updated based on the researches that requires vast space. Tools build in this area could not be build by one databases so, database like NCBI, PDB, EMBDL, Medline etc... have been developed to share its resources. At present development of bioinformatics tools are tremendously increasingly for real-time decision making for which it is vital to evaluate the performance of the tool by means of retrieval ability. Since mostly tools are web-based that utilizes various databases for information retrieval or mining information's it is vital for evaluating the retrieval ability along with error report of the tools for performance based quality assessment. Metrics is a measure that qualifies the characteristics of a product in numerical data that have being observed. In this paper few web-based bioinformatics tools have been taken, that retrieves documents from PubMed database for which the tools performances have been evaluated by quantitative means through metrics. Selective metrics that have been used are Information retrieval, error report, F-measure etc... for performance evaluation for which detailed result analysis have been narrated. From the observation made from the analyzed results on the tools will help to provide a guideline for developing better tools or selecting better tool for better decision making with enhanced qualities. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH.