Abstract:
State of the art methods on bioinformatics include the use of public databases to publish the scientific breakthroughs. These databases provide valuable knowledge for the medical practice. But, given their specificity and heterogeneity, we cannot expect the medical practitioners to include their use in routine investigations. To obtain a real benefic from them, the clinician needs integrated views over the vast amount of knowledge sources, enabling a seamless querying and navigation.
The bioinformatics group at the University of Aveiro has been developing several techniques for extracting, integrating and visualize genotype-to-phenotype data. GeneBrowser, for instance, is a web portal that can be used to better understand the biological relations between a set of genes. It integrates bibliography information with functional annotations, using Gene Ontology, Entrez Gene, KEGG Orthology and KEGG Pathways. Diseasecard (www.diseasecard.org) is another web portal system that provides a single entry point to access relevant medical and genetic information available in the Internet about rare diseases.
This talk will describe some of the research projects in which the group is currently involved specially concerning data integration and text mining.