Design and implementation of an intelligent agent system for genome data retrieval

Agent based systems are being used in operating systems, application suites, search engines, process automations, databases, information filtering etc. Recently, agent based technologies have been introduced into the field of bioinformatics. In this paper, a novel intelligent genome search agent is proposed. The genome search agent is designed using recent agent based design methodologies. A simple but efficient query mechanism is implemented to suit the need of non-programmer biologists. The usage of XML and its family of powerful query mechanisms makes the proposed system semantic to both human and machine. XML based mechanism also adds value by enabling easy exchange of information across wide variety of applications and platforms present in the realm of bioinformatics. Intelligent selection of the fastest biological data source has been used extensively by the proposed system. A lightweight client side decompression algorithm is implemented for genome retrieval making the proposed system nearly three times faster than the existing genome retrieval systems.