An Agent-oriented Notification System for Sequence (Re) Annotation in Genomic Databases

Most bioinformatics research projects have adopted database management systems. Each project builds its own database schema to store sequence (re) annotations. However, as the number of bioinformatics projects grows, new database management issues emerge, such as, project management, project collaboration, schema integration, data distribution, data provenance, etc. This work investigates some public and specific genomic project databases and their support for collaboration between researchers involved in related genomic sequences projects. This work also proposes an agent-oriented system to address genomic projects collaboration through the use of an automatic user notification mechanism.