BioAgent: A Mobile Agent System for Bioscientists

The postgenomic era is characterized by the large amount of data available from sequencing experiments. Each scientific institute works on different projects; therefore, data increases rapidly as do the difficulties in managing and sharing information among all potential users. Browsing and searching are expensive activities because extensive time is required to locate the appropriate information. To support the daily work of a bioscientist, we propose to use mobile agent, a computational unit capable of migrating to different places from any location. We then introduce BioAgent, a mobile agent-based system aiming at: 1) complete decentralization of local tasks processing that presently characterizes a workflow of an experiment; 2) reduction of network traffic, thereby freeing researchers from network faults during the experiment, and 3) freeing bioscientists from the need for continuous connection to a laptop. The system is simple, modular, easy to use and implemented in Java.