BioInfoBase : A Bioinformatics Resourceome

TL;DR

BioInfoBase is a comprehensive, annotated, and organized online repository of bioinformatics databases, tools, and resources designed to help researchers efficiently find relevant resources based on contextual and functional relevance.

Contribution

It introduces a curated, searchable database with detailed annotations and a TF-IDF based ranking system to improve resource discovery in bioinformatics.

Findings

Over 2500 records registered in BioInfoBase.

Search results are ranked using TF-IDF for relevance.

The resource is publicly accessible at www.bioinfobase.info.

Abstract

Over the past decade there has been a significant growth in bioinformatics databases, tools and resources. Although, bioinformatics is becoming more specific, increasing the number of bioinformatics-wares has made it difficult for researchers to find the most appropriate databases, tools or methods which match their needs. Our coordinated effort has been planned to establish a reference website in Bioinformatics as a public repository of tools, databases, directories and resources annotated with contextual information and organized by functional relevance. Within the first phase of BioInfoBase development, 22 experts in different fields of molecular biology contributed and more than 2500 records were registered, which are increasing daily. For each record submitted to the database of website almost all related data (40 features) has been extracted. These include information from the biological category and subcategory to the scientific article and developer information. Searching the query keyword(s) returns links containing the entered keyword(s) found within the different features of the records with more weights on the title, abstract and application fields. The search results simply provide the users with the most informative features of the records to select the most suitable ones. The usefulness of the returned results is ranked according to the matching score based on the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) methods. Therefore, this search engine will screen a comprehensive index of bioinformatics tools, databases and resources and provide the best suited records (links) to the researchers need. The BioInfoBase resource is available at www.bioinfobase.info.