BioAssist

The NBIC support programme, BioAssist, is a collaborative endeavour in which biologists and (bio)informaticians organise bioinformatics support in a collaborative fashion. The BioAssist programme picks up ‘code’ and ‘content’ of generic value and assists the original developers in developing these assets for community use. So called ‘Support platforms’ integrate tools and databases to provide specific bioinformatics functionalities needed for the analysis, integration and interpretation of experimental data from Genomics, Proteomics and Metabolomics approaches. The tools and databases incorporated in these platforms need not be provided as a central service, but can remain at distributed and connected local computer systems (GRID nodes) of the contributors. Consequently, these tools and databases are continuously updated and maintained by the respective NBIC partners.

As of September 2009, a dedicated, centrally managed, but distributed software engineering team supports the scientifically driven platforms to develop professional software and content services.
New and emerging technologies from the e-Science, Web and Grid communities increasingly support this interactive and flexible approach. Moreover, it ensures timely adaptation of the platforms to keep pace with the changing needs and increasingly complex questions of the life sciences community.

e-Bioscience

E-bioscience is the application of e-science approaches in biosciences for multi-disciplinary, distributed collaborations. The BioAssist e-bioscience infrastructure enables seamless incorporation and integration of data producing research facilities, larger data collections, and computing power. In addition this infrastructure will soon be indispensable for complex interpretation through computational analysis and visualisation.