Building Analysis Environments : Beyond the Genome and the Web

Functional genomics is a relatively new field of molecular biology that studies how genomic information defines the functions of proteins in living organisms. The complexity of the domain that functional genomics examines and the amount of data this field produces demand that we adopt powerful computational techniques for data analysis. Advanced natural language processing (NLP) and data mining methods, enriched by ontologies that specify the domain’s semantics, seem to be a promising approach. However, interdisciplinary work will play a key role in this field’s development.