Driven both by the new discipline of genomics and increasing use of multi-dimensional imaging technologies, the amount of digital information in the life sciences is growing exponentially. Biologists are faced with the challenge of organizing and integrating this torrent of biological data, held in a plethora of genomic sequence, sequence-related and other types of databases and scattered across many thousands of articles in the published literature.

As part of the response to this challenge, EMBO, the European Molecular Biology Organization, took the lead to create the E-BioSci network, a next generation scientific information platform that will interlink genomic and other factual data with the life sciences research literature.

The platform will offer scientists and other researchers new forms of navigation through an increasingly intricate and often confusing information landscape. Work on E-BioSci is currently carried out with financial support from the European Commission (Contract no. QLRI-CT-2001-30266). Together with partners drawn from different research institutions across Europe, EMBO aims to develop the platform into a freely available service for the research community.

E-BioSci's Partner Organizations

Current partners in the E-BioSci project include organizations providing bibliographic or sequence-related information at both national and international levels. The scope and nature of resources shared will expand as the platform develops. During the EC-funded project phase, efforts will be taken to develop and implement network communication protocols that allow new services to join and to exchange information with a minimum of changes in their existing technology.

One of E-BioSci's main distinguishing features is that it links together a distributed set of resources. These consist of different types of scientific information, including journal full text and molecular, genomic and multi-dimensional image databases. Interlinkage of related information will be mainly achieved by semantic matching of conceptual fingerprints. This system was developed by Collexis b.v., who contributed to the development of E-BioSci's first prototype as sub-contractors to the EC-funded project.

In contrast to other, more conventional bibliographic services, E-BioSci should be viewed primarily as a discovery tool that allows researchers to explore the semantic connections between the literature, different types of molecular datasets and image repositories. Besides allowing easy navigation through different information types, new visualisation tools will facilitate the analysis and integration of information.

Home | Prototype | About E-BioSci | Partners | Publications | Internal Site | ORIEL |

Contact Us | News | Meetings | Partners Only | Presentations | E-Publishing | EMBO

This project is funded by the European Commission as E-BioSci, contract no. QLRI-CT-2001-30266, under the RTD Programme "Quality of Life and Management of Living Resources".

Website last updated:

Website designed and maintained by Anne Seller (E-BioSci and ORIEL Projects, EMBO).

© European Molecular Biology Organization, 2001-2004. Most of the information available from this site is within the public domain and unless stated otherwise, may be freely downloaded and reproduced, provided that the source is acknowledged. However, some material may be copyright protected. For such material, the submitting authors retain all rights for reproduction or redistribution. Permission to reproduce these documents may be required. Please also read our Disclaimer.