A high throughput approach to keep alive a web-based database system for multiple search among published bioinformatics tools and databases

Since modern Biology has been transformed to a quantitative science dealing with tremendous amounts of data, the applications of information science and technology on Biology, i.e. Bioinformatics, are so many that they comprise a separate dataset needing organization and indexing for optimum search and information retrieval. Metabasis, a web-based database system for organizing and maintaining information relevant to published bioinformatics tools and databases has been developed by our group. However, such an effort requires rapid and massive information update, an issue quite difficult since the bioinformatics tools production rate is very high and there is no standard protocol in the way they are presented in the literature. We present here a high throughput automatic retrieval procedure to keep alive a database of this kind, using certain methodology for automatic downloading, parsing and filtering data from the related literature.