A distributed multimedia database visualization within an immersive environment for bioinformatics

Biological databases have become increasingly important distributed resources in this field. These databases contain a mix of data types, including sequence data, structured data such as molecular weights or GC content, and annotations in terms of controlled vocabularies and, increasingly, ontology such as the gene ontology, as well as free text data in comment fields. The genomic information resulting from this, show however, some characteristics that makes them very difficult to interpret and to exploit. They are stored in huge amount of data, are heterogeneous, and are geographically distributed. This paper proposes a combination of two systems, GenoMEDIA and Genome3DExplorer, addressing the problem of integrating and visualization of these heterogeneous databases and software utilities within a generic distributed platform.