Indiana University provides life sciences data via the TeraGrid
Indiana University is making a large variety of life sciences data available to the US research community via the TeraGrid, through the IU Centralized Life Sciences Data (CLSD) service. The data available via CLSD include amongst others dbSNP, Saccaromyces Genome Database, PubMed, and several NCBI BLAST databases including NT, NR, and SP. There are three important reasons that use of CLSD may be of value to scientists who regularly use these publicly available data sets in their research:
-Access of data from multiple databases using a single standard Structured Query Language (SQL) query. This allows researchers to merge data from multiple sources. In addition, one can execute a BLAST search within an SQL query and merge the results with data from other sources. It provides the only SQL query engine currently available for dbSNP.
-IU keeps data in CLSD constantly up to date, so researchers can access data from CLSD with confidence that they are getting the most recent data.
-Researchers can use a web page to execute an SQL query, or write programs that use a WSRF web service, a JAX-RPC web service, JDBC, or a DB2 client library to send queries to CLSD and retrieve data.
US researchers who are interested in making use of this service are invited to contact the IU TeraGrid Research Partner site -- the Research Technologies Division of Indiana University. This service is being offered in pilot mode at present, with an aim to establishing it as a production service in the near future. We are actively soliciting input on what data sources and access methods would be most useful for researchers and looking for partners to test and expand the service.
This service is being delivered to the national research community as part of IU's contributions to the NSF-funded TeraGrid (www.teragrid.org). IU's strategy with CLSD is straightforward -- CLSD is more a platform on which research groups can build applications than it is an application itself. For example, one lab within IU built a query tool that searched several independent databases and provided great value to the lab -- using about one month's worth of part time effort by a graduate student in Informatics to build the tool. The tools built on top of CLSD may be made publicly available, or kept private to a particular research group.
For more information send email to researchtechnologies@iu.edu or find more information about the Centralized Life Sciences Data (CLSD) Web Site at http://researchtechnologies.uits.iu.edu/clsd/.
