Transparent Access to Multiple Bioinformatics Information Sources (TAMBIS) addresses the perennial problem of heterogeneity and distribution of bioinformatics resources in performing bioinformatics analyses. Asking questions of these resources usually requires multiple resources to be used and data transferred between those resources. A biologist using these resources needs much knowledge of which resources to use, where they are to be found, in which order they should be used, and how to overcome the heterogeneity between those resources. TAMBIS seeks to make this knowledge burden transparent by cap turing knowledge about molecular biology and bioinformatics tasks in an ontology. The TAMBIS ontology acts as a global schema over diverse resources and drives a query formulation interface offering a common language over those resources. High-level, conceptual, source-independent queries are rewritten to concrete query plans. As a result of its transparency, TAMBIS frees a biologist from needing informatics knowledge to concentrate upon the biological question.
Keywords:
transparent access;
ontology;
mediation;
semantic heterogeneity;
distribution