Search Computing: Integrating Ranked Data in the Life Sciences

Search computing has been proposed to support the integration of the results of search engines with other data and computational resources. In essence, in search computing, search services provide ranked answers to requests, and mechanisms are provided for integrating results from multiple searches. This paper presents a case study of the use of a domain independent search computing platform for describing well known bioinformatics resources as search services, and for carrying out integrated analyses over the resulting services. In particular, this makes explicit how ranked data from sequence comparisons and from gene expression results can be integrated in a way that takes account of the ranked results from the different types of data. In so doing, the paper illustrates the use of ranking as a first class citizen for data integration in the life sciences, and identifies open issues for further investigation.