RESUMO
The application of semantic technologies to the integration of biological data and the interoperability of bioinformatics analysis and visualization tools has been the common theme of a series of annual BioHackathons hosted in Japan for the past five years. Here we provide a review of the activities and outcomes from the BioHackathons held in 2011 in Kyoto and 2012 in Toyama. In order to efficiently implement semantic technologies in the life sciences, participants formed various sub-groups and worked on the following topics: Resource Description Framework (RDF) models for specific domains, text mining of the literature, ontology development, essential metadata for biological databases, platforms to enable efficient Semantic Web technology development and interoperability, and the development of applications for Semantic Web data. In this review, we briefly introduce the themes covered by these sub-groups. The observations made, conclusions drawn, and software development projects that emerged from these activities are discussed.
RESUMO
The popular European Molecular Biology Open Software Suite (EMBOSS) currently contains over 400 tools used in various bioinformatics researches, equipped with sophisticated development frameworks for interoperability and tool discoverability as well as rich documentations and various user interfaces. In order to further strengthen EMBOSS in the fields of genomics, we here present a novel EMBOSS associated software (EMBASSY) package named GEMBASSY, which adds more than 50 analysis tools from the G-language Genome Analysis Environment and its Representational State Transfer (REST) and SOAP web services. GEMBASSY basically contains wrapper programs of G-language REST/SOAP web services to provide intuitive and easy access to various annotations within complete genome flatfiles, as well as tools for analyzing nucleic composition, calculating codon usage, and visualizing genomic information. For example, analysis methods such as for calculating distance between sequences by genomic signatures and for predicting gene expression levels from codon usage bias are effective in the interpretation of meta-genomic and meta-transcriptomic data. GEMBASSY tools can be used seamlessly with other EMBOSS tools and UNIX command line tools. The source code written in C is available from GitHub (https://github.com/celery-kotone/GEMBASSY/) and the distribution package is freely available from the GEMBASSY web site (http://www.g-language.org/gembassy/).
