The Ambiguous Bioinformatics Domain: A Conceptual Map of Information Science Applications for Molecular Biology

摘要

While bioinformatics has generated a great deal of study within both the molecular biology and computer science research communities, there has been relatively little research in information science, despite the fact that there are a number of clear opportunities for information scientists to make significant contributions. We believe that this is in part a direct result of uncertainty as to what bioinformatics actually is, and the nature of the problems in biology that could be addressed. This presentation seeks to reduce the ambiguity of bioinformatics and enumerate classes of problems in molecular biology that can be addressed by information scientists. We provide a conceptual mapping of information science research areas to a generalized model of an experimental cycle in molecular biology, providing granularity of sub-tasks and citations to specific application examples.