ARN: analysis and prediction by adipogenic professional database

A systematic review on literature-based discovery workflow

As scientific publication rates increase, knowledge acquisition and the research development process have become more complex and time-consuming. Literature-Based Discovery (LBD), supporting automated knowledge discovery, helps facilitate this process by eliciting novel knowledge by analysing existing scientific literature. This systematic review provides a comprehensive overview of the LBD workflow by answering nine research questions related to the major components of the LBD workflow (i.e., input, process, output, and evaluation). With regards to the input component, we discuss the data types and data sources used in the literature. The process component presents filtering techniques, ranking/thresholding techniques, domains, generalisability levels, and resources. Subsequently, the output component focuses on the visualisation techniques used in LBD discipline. As for the evaluation component, we outline the evaluation techniques, their generalisability, and the quantitative measures used to validate results. To conclude, we summarise the findings of the review for each component by highlighting the possible future research directions.

BioGraph: a web application and a graph database for querying and analyzing bioinformatics resources

BACKGROUND

Several online databases provide a large amount of biomedical data of different biological entities. These resources are typically stored in systems implementing their own data model, user interface and query language. On the other hand, in many bioinformatics scenarios there is often the need to use more than one resource. The availability of a single bioinformatics platform that integrates many biological resources and services is, for those reasons a fundamental issue.

DESCRIPTION

Here, we present BioGraph, a web application that allows to query, visualize and analyze biological data belonging to several online available sources. BioGraph is built upon our previously developed graph database called BioGraphDB, that integrates and stores heterogeneous biological resources and make them available by means of a common structure and a unique query language. BioGraph implements state-of-the-art technologies and provides pre-compiled bioinformatics scenarios, as well as the possibility to perform custom queries and obtaining an interactive and dynamic visualization of results.

CONCLUSION

We present a case study about functional analysis of microRNA in breast cancer in order to demonstrate the functionalities of the system. BioGraph is freely available at http://biograph.pa.icar.cnr.it . Source files are available on GitHub at https://github.com/IcarPA-TBlab/BioGraph.