NCBC iTools
iTools is an infrastructure for managing (databasing, traversal and comparison) of diverse computational biology resources. There are 3 types of resources within iTools – data, software tools and web-services. The iTools design, implementation and resource meta-data content reflect the broad research, computational, applied and scientific expertise available at the 7 National Centers for Biomedical Computing, www.NCBCs.org.
Specifically, iTools provides an infrastructure for classification, categorization and integration of different computational biology resources across space-and-time scales, biomedical problems, computational infrastructures and mathematical foundations.
A large number of resources, developed by the NCBCs and other initiatives, are already iTools-accessible to the community and this infrastructure is rapidly growing. iTools provides several flexible human and machine interfaces to its resource meta-data repository.
Funding
This work was funded by the National Institutes of Health through the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, Grants U54-RR021813 (CCB), U54-DA021519 (NCIBI),
U54-CA121852 (MAGNet), U54-HG004028 (NCBO), U54-GM072970 (Simbios), U54-EB005149 (NA-MIC) and U54-LM008748 (I2B2).
Information on the National Centers for Biomedical Computing can be obtained from
nihroadmap.nih.gov/bioinformatics and
www.NCBCs.org
Reference
Dinov ID, Rubin D, Lorensen W, Dugan J, Ma J, Murphy S, Kirschner B, Bug W, Sherman M, Floratos A, Kennedy D, Jagadish HV, Schmidt J, Athey B, Califano A, Musen M, Altman R, Kikinis R, Kohane I, Delp S, Parker DS, Toga AW. (2008) iTools: A Framework for Classification, Categorization and Integration of Computational Biology Resources. PLoS ONE 3(5): e2265. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002265.