Integrative Bioinformatics

The increasingly reliable and affordable high-throughput production of many different types of biomolecular data, and the development of pipelines for their automatic processing and annotation, have further stressed the need for integrative structures able to simplify accessibility and decrease redundancy and variety of semantic representations of life science data. Integrative bioinformatics addresses these aspects taking advantage of several different approaches and implementations proposed to integrate distributed heterogeneous data with notable applications in the biological domain; they include information linkage, federated databases, multi-databases, mediator-based solutions, and data warehousing. Additionally, ontology-based, statistical and network-based data integration can also be effectively used for better biologically driven data integration.