Special section: Life science grids for biomedicine and bioinformatics

Grid architecture and technology are finding applications in the life sciences, enabling data storage, pre-processing, analysis, and interpretation. Biological data needs to be semantically annotated through comparison techniques that correlate unknown data with those of known function. The real problem underlies the Grid concept is coordinated resource sharing and problem solving in dynamic, multi-institutional virtual organizations. The grid paradigm offers CPU and data handling capabilities and allows users and laboratories to share their facilities through high bandwidth networks between dynamically formed virtual organizations. The value of bioinformatic databases can be imp[roved by deploying them as a decentralized, semantically integrated service-oriented data grid. A graphical user interface provides a semantic editor that allows the composition of workflows.