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Agents in bioinformatics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2006

MICHAEL LUCK
Affiliation:
School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK; e-mail: mml@ecs.soton.ac.uk
EMANUELA MERELLI
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Università di Camerino, Italy; e-mail: emanuela.merelli@unicam.it

Abstract

The scope of the Technical Forum Group (TFG) on Agents in Bioinformatics (BIOAGENTS) was to inspire collaboration between the agent and bioinformatics communities with the aim of creating an opportunity to propose a different (agent-based) approach to the development of computational frameworks both for data analysis in bioinformatics and for system modelling in computational biology. During the day, the participants examined the future of research on agents in bioinformatics primarily through 12 invited talks selected to cover the most relevant topics. From the discussions, it became clear that there are many perspectives to the field, ranging from bio-conceptual languages for agent-based simulation, to the definition of bio-ontology-based declarative languages for use by information agents, and to the use of Grid agents, each of which requires further exploration. The interactions between participants encouraged the development of applications that describe a way of creating agent-based simulation models of biological systems, starting from an hypothesis and inferring new knowledge (or relations) by mining and analysing the huge amount of public biological data. In this report we summarize and reflect on the presentations and discussions.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
2005 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This report is a personal view of the first AgentLink Technical Forum Group on Agents in Bioinformatics, informed by talks and postmeeting contributions from participants: Giuliano Armano, Andrea Doms, Nicola Cannata, Flavio Corradini, Mark d'Inverno, Phil Lord, Andrew Martin, Luciano Milanesi, Steffen Moeller, Terry Payne.