SOA-Based Interoperability Applications for Bio-manufacturing

Principal Investigator: T.N. Bhat
(301) 975-5448
talapady.bhat@nist.gov

Objective:
To develop Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based technology, standards, and applications that may be applicable to a wide range of industrial problems ranging from manufacturing to discovery and scientific research. The main focus of the work will be on Bio-manufacturing and drug-discovery with particular emphasis on internet-based databases and the Semantic Web.

Background:
The last decade has seen an amazing explosion in the field of bioinformatics fueled by the large-scale genomics sequencing efforts funded by NIH, NSF, DOE and private industry. Recently, new initiatives in Structural Genomics and Proteomics are underway that will be much more data intensive, with both large volumes and more complex data representations. Today the harvesting and management of large sets of biological structural data, and the mining of the information contained therein, is an activity that is transforming biological science, biotechnology, drug manufacturing, and the pharmaceutical industry. In most cases, the amount of data is enormous: thousands of macromolecular structures, millions of protein sequences, tens of thousands of structural and sequence neighbors. Traditional databases, and Web tools have again and gain proven inadequate to manage this wealth of information. Modern Service Oriented Architecture and working on state-of-the-art service based on relevant ontologies delivered through powerful databases may be a solution for this problem faced both by the manufacturing industry and scientific community alike.