Tool Integration Framework for Systems Biology, is a research project at ISIS sponsored by the BioCOMP program of DARPA/IPTO. The BioCOMP program is sponsoring the development of Bio-SPICE, an open source framework and software toolset for Systems Biology. Its goals are to develop, license, distribute, and maintain a comprehensive software environment that integrates a suite of analytical, simulation, and visualization tools and services to aid biological researchers engaged in building computable descriptions of cellular functions.
The participation of ISIS in this project is intended to maturate the tool integration framework, leveraging the expertise and technologies such as model-based design, transformation, and tool integration developed in prior research at ISIS. Experience in developing tool integration solution for engineering domains, indicates that the key ingredient for robust tool integration is semantically precise definition of interchange formats. Thus, a primary goal for the ISIS project is to formalize the interchange formats that are in use in Bio-SPICE, by developing meta-models and specifying semantic well-formedness rules. An additional goal for the ISIS project is to help evolve the current integration framework towards standards based approach, and facilitate peer-level collaboration with industry-standard Open Tool Integration Frameworks, to enable richer, wider scoped, distributed, multi-dimensional tool integration scenarios.
