The world wide web(WWW)has becomecritical for storing and disseminatingbiological data. It offers an additional opportunity, however,to support distributed computation and sharing of results. Currently, computationalanalysis tools are often separatedfromthe data in a mannerthat makesiterative hypothesistesting cumbersome.Wehypothesizethat the cycle of scientific reasoning (using data to build models, and evaluating modelsin light of data)canbe facilitated withresourcesthai link computations with semantic modelsof the data. RIBOWEBis all on-line knowledge-basedresource that supports the creation of three-dimensionalmodelsof the 30Sribosomalsubunit. It has three components:(I) knowledgebasecontainingrepresentationsof the essential physical comPonentsand publishedstructural data, (II) computationalmodulesthat use the knowledgebaseto build or analyzestructural models,and (III) a web-baseduser interface that supports multiple users, sessions and computations.Wehavebuilt a prototype of RIBO...
Richard O. Chen, Ramon M. Felciano, Russ B. Altman