Time to Organize the Bioinformatics Resourceome

The initial steps toward a bioinformatics resourceome areclear. First, an overall ontology with the high-level concepts(algorithms, databases, organizations, papers, people, etc.)must be created, with a set of standard attributes and astandard set of relations between these concepts (e.g., peoplepublish papers, papers describe algorithms or databases,organizations house people, etc.). The initial ontology shouldbe compact and built for distributed collaborative extension.Second, a mechanism for people to extend this ontology withsubconcepts in order to describe their own resources shouldbe designed. The precise location of a tool within a taxonomyis not critical—the author will place it somewhere based onthe location of similar/competing resources or based on abest-informed guess. Others may create links to the resourcefrom other appropriate locations in the taxonomy in order toensure that competing interpretations of the appropriateconceptual location for the resource are accommodated.Third, the formats for the ontologies and the resourcedescriptions should be published so enterprising softwareengineers can create interfaces for surfing, searching, andviewing the resources. The resulting distributed system ofresource descriptions would be extensible, robust, and usefulto the entire biomedical research community