ECHO: Encyclopedia of Hepatocellular Carcinoma Genes Online
Abstract
The number of specialized biological databases created along with ever-increasing sizes has been growing steadily year by year. This has made the tasks of performing cross-site browsing or iterative querying very tedious and challenging.  In addition to joining the paradigm shift of next generation web ¡Ð a more methodical way to provide services through the web and publish organized information via semantic webs, we try to tackle this challenging task by implementing software agents or softbots to automatically collect scattered gene annotations either by directly mining data sources on the web or by querying into publicly accessible databases. Our focus is on the design of an information harvesting infrastructure to support flexible storage and presentation, and further on the construction of an excellent content management environment to support both human-human and human-computer interactions. The resulting system, dubbed ECHO, is an integrated biological information portal for efficient sharing of information, and extensive aggregation of closely related research topics. ECHO provides a solution toward this objective and as a showcase we demonstrate how hepatocellular carcinoma cancer related research information can be gathered and shared among collaborators.