BioGuideSRS: Querying Multiple Sources with a User Perspective

Biologists are faced with the problem of integrating information from multiple heterogeneous public sources with their own experimental data contained in individual sources. It is difficult for them to choose between the numerous sources without assistance. Interestingly, biologists not only express preferences concerning the sources to be queried but also differ in their strategies i.e. the querying process they follow for navigating through the sources. In [3] we have introduced BioGuide, as a user-centric framework that allows to specify various querying processes and takes into account user preferences on the sources. In this paper, we present BioGuideSRS, a user-friendly system which accesses instances of data by using BioGuide on top of the SRS system. We show how BioGuideSRS meets the needs collected during our study of user’s requirements and illustrate its use with some examples. Availability: http://www.lri.fr/∼cohen/bioguideSRS/bioguideSRS.html