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Abstract -- The Internet and the Genome Project
U3: Public Health and Medicine
The Internet and the Genome Project
- Jacobson, Dan
( danj@gdb.org)
Abstract
The past four years have witnessed dramatic changes in the ways that
information is provided on the internet. The internet has gone from an
environment where access to information was difficult, and oriented toward
those with a high level of technical expertise to one where the average
computer user can sit at their desk-top PC/Mac and literally point and
click there way around the world. Perhaps not coincidently the internet
has entered into an explosive growth phase. Much of the changes have come
about due to the development of a three network protocols and a few pieces
of software which implement them. WAIS, Gopher, and World Wide Web (WWW)
are network based information dissemination protocols which operate on the
client-server model. These three protocols have dramatically changed the
face of the internet. At the forefront of this disciplines taking
advantage of this wave of changes are, surprisingly, the biologists.
Computational biologists have long been involved in the internet but now
"Joe and Josaphine Biologist" are starting to use the network resources
available to them. Of central importance to the Genome Project, molecular
biology, and biochemistry is access to databases which contain information
about molecular sequences and there function, 3D structures of proteins,
genetic mapping information, and the associated literature citations.
Here, we discuss work done with network information servers based on the
World Wide Web protocol which gives starts to give an integrated view for
these various database needs.