SWAMI: integrating biological databases and analysis tools within user friendly environment

In the last decade, many projects have tried to deal with the integration of biological resources. Web portals have flourished online, each providing data from a public provider. Although these online resources are available with a set of manipulation tools, scientists, researchers, and students often have to shift from one resource to another to accomplish a particular task. Making a rich tool set available along with a variety of databases, data formats, and computational capabilities is a complex task. It requires building a versatile environment for data integration, data manipulation, and data storage. In this paper, we study the requirements and report the architectural design of a web application, code named SWAMI, which aims at integrating a rich tool set and a variety of biological databases. The suggested architecture is highly scalable in terms of adding databases and new manipulation tools.