Muhammad Shaalan, [٠٣.٠٨.٢٠ ٠٠:٤٥]<br />Traditional Technology <br /><br />Traditional technology often does not meet the needs of life scientists. Each research laboratory uses significant manpower to adjust and customize as much as possible the available technology. Because of the failure of traditional approaches to support scientific discovery, life scientists have proven to be highly creative in developing their own tools and systems to meet their needs. Traditional database systems lack flexibility: Life scientists use flat files instead. Some of the tools and systems developed in scientific laboratories may not meet the expectations of computer scientists, but they perform and support thousands of life scientists. The development of BIS is driven by the needs of a community. But practice shows that the community now needs the development of systems that are more engineered than before, and computer scientists should be involved.<br />There are good reasons for traditional technology to fail to meet the requirements of BIS. Databases are data-driven and lack flexibility at the level of data representation. XML and other semi-structured approaches may offer this needed flexibility, but the development of native semi-structured systems still is in its infancy. Knowledge bases offer different semantic layers to leverage queries with the exploration process, but they should be coupled with databases to perform traditional data manipulation. On the other hand, agent architectures and grids provide flexible and transparent management of tools. Each of these approaches may and should contribute to the design of BIS.<br />The systems presented in this book constitute the first generation of BIS. Each system addresses some of the requirements presented in Chapter 2. Each presented system still is successfully used by life scientists; however, the development of each of these systems told a lesson. To be successful, the design of the next generation of BIS should take advantage of these lessons and exploit and combine all existing approaches.<br /><br />Keywords: Traditional, Technology, developeing<br />mazin hadi kzar