Smart spaces for adaptive information integration in bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is reaping the benefits of advances in Semantic Web technology thanks to the growing number of available biomedical web resources and portals. Although positive in general, this abundance poses practical challenges to researchers who must be skilled in techniques for retrieving and integrating sparse and complex contents, and thereof calls for more “intelligent” and user friendly ways of interaction to easily get information. With the aim of making available the intelligent functionality of smart systems, this paper presents SSAIIB (Smart Spaces for Adaptive Information Integration in Bioinformatics), a reference framework for designing bioinformatics smart applications that support discovering, aggregating and delivering contents from web resources according to user’s goals, tasks and concerns. The “Smart Spaces” are software environments whose smartness lies in their ability to adaptively accomplish specific user’s activities such as the exploiting content from biomedical resources, integrating data captured from different sources, supporting data analytics, etc. SSAIIB is structured around two main technologies: service oriented architectures and software agents. In particular, it relies on mechanisms for dynamically assembling suitable services and the use of agents as a natural metaphor for both modelling user’s activities and accessing web resources. A case study is presented that shows the application of SSAIIB to the design and the implementation of a smart space for annotating biomedical texts.