A web browser that can understand technical terms in life sciences and automatically find additional resources and services has been developed by European researchers. It could lead to a new generation of intelligent search engines.

The life sciences community has built numerous databases - such as those for gene sequencing and information about diseases - that are available to researchers as 'grid' services.

"Grid computing is essentially about building virtual organisations that are independent of the physical location where they reside," says Michael Schroeder of Technische Universität Dresden.

The problem is how to link those services to other scientific information found on the web.

Schroeder is coordinator of the EU-funded Sealife project which has created a 'semantic grid browser' to make grid services for the life sciences much more accessible.

"We have the web on the one hand and then we have grid computing, with its many services, on the other," he says. A semantic grid browser seamlessly integrates them.

"It tries to understand what it finds on web pages, interprets this content and then links it, on the fly, to services that might be useful to the user."

The key to the Sealife browser is a 'semantic hyperlink' that shows up on the page to direct users to relevant services. The link is not put there by the website but by the browser itself.

 

Further information:  

• Official press release - ICT Results website
• Sealife website