BioWebEngine: a generation environment for bioinformatics research

With technologies for massively parallel genome sequencing available, bioinformatics has entered the “big data” era. Developing applications in this field involves collaboration of domain experts with IT specialists to specify programs able to query several sources, obtain data in several formats, search them for significant patterns and present the obtained results according to several types of visualisation. Based on the experience gained in developing several Web portals for accessing and querying genomics and proteomics databases, we have derived a meta-model of such portals and implemented BioWebEngine, a generation environment where a user is assisted in specifying and deploying the intended portal according to the meta-model.