there is no doubt that in this millennium biotechnology is turning out to be one of the most important branches of the industry.
all over the world research is conducted with high speed in the fields of molecular biology.
that causes an exponentially increasing flood of results and knowledge.
most data collections are incompatible to each other for one reason or another.
molecular biology and bioinformatics will play an increasing role in the development of pharmaceuticals and therapeutic methods.
more and more bioinformatics becomes a key technology within the life sciences field.
the information from both the molecular biology and medical sciences is extremely variable with respect to structure and content.
there is information about primary sequences of nucleic acids and proteins and knowledge about the general behaviour and properties of the relevant classes of biological molecules.
then follows the secondary and three-dimensional sequence information of nucleic acids and proteins, the general regulatory units of genes and the information about the biochemical pathways and the complete information relationships of the complex network of parameters.
by the metalife approach it is possible to gather an immense amount of new information about general cybernetic rules and biological regulation systems
the worldwide available research results could be used much better if they would be systematically collected and evaluated. this would avoid also research redundancy and absolutely new knowledge could be gathered by using intelligent datadases.
the temporary used analysis tools in bioinformatics depend on human decision taking.
this is time consuming and complicated compared to the methodology of dna sequencing.
the requirements are obvious, knowledge generation must become much more automated.
the main task of the metalife project is to make the worldwide stored heterogeneous information of molecular biology and medicine optimally usable.
the metalife project focuses only on information optimisation, transformation of information into knowledge and management of knowledge in the life sciences area.
metalife aims to develop tools which allow an automation of functional analysis of biological data.
methods of automatic knowledge generation with state-of-the-art database technologies and intelligent user interfaces are concatenated with the know-how of life sciences experts.