Bioinformatics in the United States: Recent Trends from a Microbiological Perspective

The United States bioinformatics community is beginning to focus on database interoperability. The emerging federation concept promotes adherence to prescribed standards in data modelling syntax, and semantics. The genomic database producers are taking a leadership role in exploring the technical and social aspects of facilitating the retrieval of data from multiple sites in response to complex queries over the Internet. This paper presents an overview of the types of problems that must be solved to achieve full interoperability and identifies major biological database producers in the U.S. that are poised to link with others via the Internet.