Large knowledge based applications in molecular biology and genetics

The informatics requirements of the molecular biology and genetics research community are becoming increasingly sophisticated and there is a developing emphasis on the integration of data from different areas of biology in order to increase the functionality and the semantic richness of the queries that can be formulated. The authors are using knowledge based methods as part of their research because they offer the most flexible and expressive representation methods for their domain and for the type of applications that they want to build. In the long term, they also believe that knowledge-based techniques will be required to meet the requirements of the users of bio-informatics systems. The authors introduce the type of applications that they are developing and how they are used, the problems of large knowledge base management and some topics they have addressed in trying to solve them. Protein structure knowledge bases, abstract representations of protein structure, Prolog knowledge base, deductive database approach, interfacing to a functional data language and FAITH, are among the applications and areas discussed