BioQuery: A Bioinformatics Source Querying Environment

Formulating and executing queries over distributed, autonomous and heterogeneous resources is an important topic within e-science in general and bioinformatics in particular. Where resources have differing query capabilities and call interfaces, and heterogeneous representations of the semantics of a domain, formulating a single query that will work over multiple resources is difficult. In the TAMBIS (Transparent Access to Multiple Bioinformatics Information Sources) system, an ontology of molecular biology and bioinformatics is used to give the illusion of a common query interface to diverse resources. The ontology is also central to the query processing and reconciliation of heterogeneities. The BioQuery project takes TAMBIS onto a new phase, where we will provide a robust service over commercial middleware provided by our industrial collaborator geneticXchange. This paper gives an overview of the TAMBIS project and its current status in BioQuery.