The bioinformatics sector has gone through many ups and downs. While “pure” informatics companies are not quite as common as they used to be, information-based science is becoming an increasing part of the discovery process. However, over the years, I am not sure that the algorithms and methods that drive informatics have taken that next step. To some extent, we are still running many of the same algorithms and doing some of the same tasks we were doing at the turn of the century. Some of the more interesting advances have been made by companies like SciTegic and InforSense, which have created environments for data pipelining and application integration. It would be nice if the data and applications took the kind of leap that those suites provide to workflow development. I have no idea how good the technology from this company is, but it is one of the few times that I have seen a potentially exciting new approach to mining and integrating all the wonderful biological information out there. The word that caught my attention was “intelligence”, a word too often mis-used (and may be here as well), but much needed in the informatics sector.
Has bioinformatics stagnated?
The bioinformatics sector has gone through many ups and downs. While “pure” informatics companies are not quite as common as they used to be, information-based science is becoming an increasing part of the discovery process. However, over the years, I am not sure that the algorithms and methods that drive informatics have taken that next step. To some extent, we are still running many of the same algorithms and doing some of the same tasks we were doing at the turn of the century. Some of the more interesting advances have been made by companies like SciTegic and InforSense, which have created environments for data pipelining and application integration. It would be nice if the data and applications took the kind of leap that those suites provide to workflow development. I have no idea how good the technology from this company is, but it is one of the few times that I have seen a potentially exciting new approach to mining and integrating all the wonderful biological information out there. The word that caught my attention was “intelligence”, a word too often mis-used (and may be here as well), but much needed in the informatics sector.
Technorati Tags: Bioinformatics, Science