The IS-BioBank project

Advances of high throughput technologies have yielded the possibility to investigate human cells of healthy and morbid ones at different levels. Consequently, this has made possible the discovery of new biological and biomedical data and the proliferation of a large number of databases. In this paper, we describe the IS-BioBank (Integrated Semantic Biological Data Bank) proposal. It consists of the realization of a framework for enabling the interoperability among different biological data sources and for ultimately supporting expert users in the complex process of extraction, navigation and visualization of the precious knowledge hidden in such a huge quantity of data. In this framework, a key role has been played by the Connectivity Map, a databank which relates diseases, physiological processes, and the action of drugs. The system will be used in a pilot study on the Multiple Myeloma (MM).