Scientists try to bring order to a glut of drug data - Apr. 29, 2010

Scientists try to bring order to a glut of drug data - Apr. 29, 2010

Anyone that has done any work in bioinformatics will appreciate this article. Biological data is continuing to be added to hundreds (if not thousands) of databases world wide. Unfortunately, with the exception of only a few standards that have survived over the years, there is very little compatibility among the various repositories. Researchers (or more often, their students) spend an enormous amount of time acquiring the data they need to perform their analyses; they often need to write various scripts to get the data from various repositories in the format they need for their own work. Since there is no standard that is adhered to, you occasionally get the owners of these repositories randomly changing their own formatting or constraints to suit their own needs. This is valuable time lost that could be spent doing actual research.