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Chapter 15
Search Computing and the Life Sciences
Search Computing has been proposed to support the integration of
the results of search engines with other data and computational resources. A
key feature of the resulting integration platform is direct support for multidomain
ordered data, reflecting the fact that search engines produce ranked
outputs, which should be taken into account when the results of several requests
are combined. In the life sciences, there are many different types of ranked data.
For example, ranked data may represent many different phenomena, including
physical ordering within a genome, algorithmically assigned scores that
represent levels of sequence similarity, and experimentally measured values
such as expression levels. This chapter explores the extent to which the search
computing functionalities designed for use with search engine results may be
applicable for different forms of ranked data that are encountered when carrying
out data integration in the life sciences. This is done by classifying different
types of ranked data in the life sciences, providing examples of different types
of ranking and ranking integration needs in the life sciences, identifying issues
in the integration of such ranked data, and discussing techniques for drawing
conclusions from diverse rankings.
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