Biomedical Resources Doubtlessly, the Internet

Biomedical Resources

Doubtlessly, the Internet has revealed itself to be one of the most powerful tools in the realms of commerce, trade, and general research, but some of its most useful applications as a public service are still in infantile stages. The possibility of utilizing the World Wide Web for medical research and exchange medical of data was recognized immediately upon its conception and is currently in process, yet, the system is far less advanced than its business counterparts. Largely, this is because of the general disorder shaping the structure of the internet; for its optimum use as a medical tool a more rigid organizational structure needs to be built. Nevertheless this has not hampered the spirits of those seeking to develop a future that might hold is a nationwide electronic database capable of immediately cataloging medical histories and providing possible diagnosis for infected individuals. Fortunately, the evolution of the internet as a medical resource is being attacked from both the standpoint of librarians -- seeking to synthesize more efficient sorting systems -- and the medical community -- seeking to adopt strategies and data interchanges more matched with the internet setting.

The difficulty with using the internet as a comprehensive tool for biomedical research, presently, is that the internet has no real organizational structure. The internet is analogous to a very large library where all the books are scattered on the floor. This is because it contains so much information, but there is no efficient procedure for sorting through the information. This, traditionally, has been the greatest problem with using the internet for massive amounts of data interchange between companies or other organizations. Although the internet was founded upon business programs called Electronic Data Interchange -- or EDI -- which where very organized, when the internet expanded to the consumer it needed to be less standardized. The issue today is: now that there is so much useful information on the internet there needs to be a way for companies and other agencies to access this information in a more efficient manner.

From the librarian's standpoint this problem is being addressed with the gradual implementation of eXtensible Markup Language, or XML. The XML processor is able to interface with an application, such as a word processing document, which allows further manipulation of the document. This flexibility of XML is what makes it so useful. With XML data can be handled in a variety of formats without expensive programming, or delays due to data conversions. XML promises to be the new language of the internet, and to bring more organized electronic commerce to small businesses, and the medical community. Accordingly, the future of biomedical electronic exchanges of information is most likely to take place over the World Wide Web rather than some private form of the internet. So, the current work being done by librarians attempting to organize the internet will make the eventual application of bioinformatics to the World Wide Web much simpler.

From the other end, the medical community is aiming to perfect their current bioinformatics computational tools. In other words, the search for the best formats to organize medical information as passed through the World Wide Web is also underway. "With the assistance of high-performance parallel computer to enhance the network connections and interactive user interface, the scaleable parallel computer architectures provide the biomedical researchers with massive amount of accurate data for long searches or computations in record time." (Lei 1998). Generally, protocols are in development to make the patient, doctor, electronic transactions as smooth, effortless, and flawless as possible. Not only that, but such a network could possibly alert various medical organizations around the country as to specific locations and occurrences of future epidemics -- which could be very useful to stopping the spread. Such an efficient plan "requires careful management to bring people and technology together in creative and innovative ways. The care plan must collect and process a tremendous quantity of information about members' health risks, histories, habits, and hopes." (Jennings 101).

Clearly, one of the primary concerns of biomedical practitioners looking to utilize accurate and efficient databases is associated with the sheer volume of information that must be stored, specifically when dealing with the genome.

Presently the billion base pairs of nucleotides and literature are available for use on the Net. New sequence analytical tools (DNAscan, Gene Inspector, GENBRIGHT, Gene Jockey II, GCG, OMIGA, etc.); three-dimensional software (Cn3D, Rasmol, MMDB, Threading, Vast, etc.); new databases (PKU, Gene Expression, GenCard, ProtoMap, etc.); digital publications; patent information; and ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) (Dolly and Polly phenomena); coming from private or public sectors, appear on the horizons." (Lei 1998).