@neuLink: a service-oriented application for biomedical knowledge discovery

We introduce the architecture of @neuLink, a service-oriented environment for biomedical knowledge discovery which has been developed in the course of EU Integrated Project @neurIST. The application integrates data from databases with information extracted from unstructured text sources. Moreover, @neuLink supports the analysis of primary biomolecular data associated with individual patients and thus enables the interpretation of molecular data inside a clinical research environment. Based on an assembly of data services, @neuLink interacts with the complex @neurIST grid infrastructure through a dedicated data access and data mediation service. Data types integrated by @neuLink are covering the entire span of biomolecular entities: from gene names in text to entries in EntrezGene; from mentions of drugs to Drugbank, from information on allelic variants in scientific literature to entries in dbSNP. The architecture of @neuLink allows easy integration of other webservice-based applications and thus the spectrum of analysis capabilities of @neuLink can be extended following the requirements of the users of the @neurIST system.