http://bioinformatics.oupjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/18/7/996
The quantity of available information on
biochemical pathways is increasing very rapidly, and it has now become possible
to perform detailed analyses of biochemical pathways. However, such analyses
face difficulties due to the nature of the pathway data that are often
heterogeneous, incomplete, or inconsistent. This makes pathway analysis a
challenging problem in system biology and in bioinformatics. In order to
develop tool for pathway analysis, the authors defined their own data model to
represent the biochemical pathways. Based on this model, they developed an
integrated software environment named PATIKA(Pathway
Analysis Tool for Integration and Knowledge Acquisition). PATIKA is composed of
a server-side server for managing queries and submissions as well as users and
client-side editors for visualizing and manipulating biochemical pathways. In
order to collaboration, PATIKA ontology uses an atomic approach to keep data
consistency and different user types and access levels to manage the data
content. The authors claim that PATIKA promises benefits for many research
fields in life sciences, including but not limited to, rapid knowledge
acquisition, Microarray data analysis, and drug development.