Project ENABLE

Abstract

ENABLE is a multidisciplinary project funded by the NSF's National Science Digital Libraries program. The major goal of this project is to apply advances in digital library technologies to the emerging domain of bioinformatics, and develop novel interaction means that support learning based on identifying and visualizing associations among key dimensions of bioinformatics resources. Recently, an ENABLE Knowledge Base prototype has been implemented. Features of the current prototype include automatic bioinformatics resource harvesting, basic information retrieval operations, resource management, visualization and learning tools. The ENABLE Knowledge Base consists of three major components: Bioinformatics resource collection Bioinformatics resource management End user services (including a web interface for searching/browsing, a scatter-gather retrieval interface, and a SRS browser) The resource collection component automatically collects and updates information of on-line bioinformatics education resources in six categories: Learning Tools, Bioinformatics Applications, Literature, Gene, and Protein. This module generates relevant keywords for each of the collected resources by integrating a web service library called Lucas II. A bioinformatics domain is used to weigh terms within the knowledge domain and to improve the quality of term generation. The management interface allows the administrators to update URL seeds, check relevancies of collected resources, and categorize them manually, etc. Based on the collected resources, the end user services provide several educational tools for the users. A web interface is available for the users to search, browse, and access the resources. Several features have been implemented to insure accessibility, usability, and data transparency of the web site. A visualization interface based on Java Applet uses a scatter-gather algorithm to help the users find more specific resources interactively. In addition, a tool called SRS Browser is developed to support the users in discovering associations between genes and proteins. With all these tools, the ENABLE prototype offers its users a variety of perspectives to view its data and to learn bioinformatics. Future work will involve integrating these tools and services, populating more quality data in the six categories, and automating the resource categorization process.