dbd@THEORY.BCHS.UH.EDU (Dan Davison) (12/16/90)
I thought I would stimulate discussion on this list a bit by offering an alternative view to Dan Davison's regular postings that describe what the Biomatrix is. This message summarizes my own view. The Biomatrix is several things: The Biomatrix exists at this moment as the set of all data bases and knowledge bases that encode biological information, and as the collection of existing computer programs that manipulate this information. Databases such as MedLine, PIR, GENBANK, and SwissProt constitute the present-day Biomatrix. The Biomatrix embodies a vision of how biologists of the future will carry out their work. To a much larger degree than today, the biological knowledge and data of the future will reside in computer systems, and the biologist of the future will employ computer tools to access this information. All forms of biological information will be encoded electronically, including traditional forms such as laboratory data, reference works, journal publications, and texts. New forms of biological information will emerge in the future Biomatrix. The Biomatrix will constitute a substrate for electronic communication among scientists. Knowledge-based systems technology will encode biological knowledge, laws, and theories in more active forms that can be used for tasks such as simulation, experiment planning, teaching, and analogical reasoning. Information repositories will be linked together over high-speed networks so that although they will be distributed geographically, they will be instantly available to researchers around the globe. The effect of the future Biomatrix will be to increase the availability of biological information to people and machines. The biologist of the future will have access to information in greater quantities and at greater speeds than today. One result of this organization will be to facilitate reasoning by analogy, whereby a biologist will bring information about a distant biological system to bear on his or her problem of interest. A second result will be that as these electronic repositories grow in size, they will be more and more difficult for people to comprehend, so biologists will employ machine learning programs of various sorts as assistants that will aid biologists in discovering new regularities in the information stored in these repositories. Finally, the Biomatrix is a community of biologists and computer scientists who share this common goal. Many aspects of the Biomatrix of the future are unattainable without fundamental advances in computer science (such as networking, databases, knowledge representation, algorithms, machine learning, and neural networks) that will be achieved from collaborations between researchers in these fields.
mike@TOME.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Michael Hawley) (12/17/90)
Of all the bulletin board groups I've seen, this one seems to have by far the highest ratio of "What this bboard is" to content. Not sure why bio-people seem so introspective.
toms@fcs260c2.ncifcrf.gov (Tom Schneider) (12/18/90)
In article <9012161930.AA01512@tome.media.mit.edu> mike@TOME.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Michael Hawley) writes: > Of all the bulletin board groups I've seen, this one seems to have by far the > highest ratio of "What this bboard is" to content. Not sure why bio-people > seem so introspective. I think it's because the topic has not yet 'caught fire'. People don't know what to say on the group, so nobody says anything, even though many people may be 'listening'. The postings may eventually spark a discussion about the topic. Tom Schneider National Cancer Institute Laboratory of Mathematical Biology Frederick, Maryland 21702-1201 toms@ncifcrf.gov