BioCloud Search EnGene: Surfing Biological Data on the Cloud

The massive production and spread of biomedical data around the web introduces new challenges related to identify computational approaches for providing quality search and browsing of web resources. This papers presents BioCloud Search EnGene (BSE), a cloud application that facilitates searching and integration of the many layers of biological information offered by public large-scale genomic repositories. Grounding on the concept of dataspace, BSE is built on top of a cloud platform that severely curtails issues associated with scalability and performance. Like popular online gene portals, BSE adopts a gene-centric approach: researchers can find their information of interest by means of a simple “Google-like” query interface that accepts standard gene identification as keywords. We present BSE architecture and functionality and discuss how our strategies contribute to successfully tackle big data problems in querying gene-based web resources. BSE is publically available at: http://biocloud-unica.appspot.com/.