Development of meta-algorithms holds a lot of promises since such meta-resources typically have various optimality properties [20].
The second type of iTools expansion involves its maturation and the accrual of new resources or types of meta-resources (e.g., IATR, [24]).
iTools is intended to be a community generated meta-resource.
Research progress also may be significantly potentiated by providing agile interfaces, extensibility and portability features to any new meta-resource of computational biology tools and software.
Our overarching aim is to build a meta-resource that catalogs computational biology data, tools and services provided by the computational biology community.
More specifically, our goal is to implement iTools as an extensible meta-resource, validate it using NCBC resources, and enable its growth in depth and breadth in the future.
The current version of iTools, as a meta-resource for computational biology resources, includes hundreds of different software tools, data archives and web-services, some provided by the NCBC community and some developed by other initiatives.
This database should allow an easy and robust access (manual or computer-initiated) to the resource descriptions, include powerful and user-friendly search and download interface, provide an agile syntax of the XML descriptors, and facilitate the meta-resource curation, community editing and evaluation.
The BioGRID, its partner interaction databases, model organism databases, and public meta-resources will all play a crucial role in biomedical research in the post-genomics era.
These datasets are disseminated by many different partner databases and meta-resources, including the Saccharomyces Genome Database [ 5] and other model organism databases, the Gene Ontology Consortium [ 6], the International Molecular Exchange (IMEx) Consortium [ 7], and the Pathway Commons initiative [ 8].
Online search engines were used, but particularly the excellent meta-search resources of the university library.
