Biological Data Processing using Model Driven Engineering

This paper shows how model-driven software development (MDSD) can be applied in the bioinformatics field since biological data structures can be easily expressed by means of models. The existence of several heterogeneous data sources is usual in the bioinformatics context. In order to validate the information stored in these data sources, several formalisms and simulation tools have been adopted. The process of importing data from the source databases and introducing it in the simulation tools is usually done by hand. This work describes how to overcome this drawback by applying MDSD techniques (e.g. model transformations). Such techniques allow us to automate the data migration process between source databases and simulation tools, making the transformation process independent of the data persistence format, obtaining more modular tools and generating traceability information automatically.