BioFacets: Faceted Classification for Biological Information

Biologists are increasingly relying on online biological databases to conduct their research. Despite the availability of hundreds of such databases, only a handful of them are effectively deployed by the community. The main reason for this is the lack of metadata provided by the databases, such as, the types of data stored, its coverage, and its relationship with other databases. Nevertheless, each database has a potential for supporting existing research investigations. The opportunity to leverage the wealth of data available presents several challenges related to data integration and representation. In this paper, we present BioFacets, a new integration system for Web based biological databases. The main feature of this system is the proposal of a new faceted classification system that allows for dynamic categorization of biological result sets. Other features of the system include query optimization, cache management and support for a meta-search engine that allows the system to efficiently search across multiple online biological databases