BioGuideSRS: querying multiple sources with a user-centric perspective

Biologists are frequently faced with the problem of integrating information from multiple heterogeneous sources with their own experimental data. Given the large number of public sources, it is difficult to choose which sources to integrate without assistance. When doing this manually, biologists differ in their preferences concerning the sources to be queried as well as the strategies, i.e. the querying process they follow for navigating through the sources. In response to these findings, we have developed BioGuide to assist scientists search for relevant data within external sources while taking their preferences and strategies into account. In this article, we present BioGuideSRS, a user-friendly system which automatically retrieves instances of data by using BloGuide on top of the sequence retrieval system (SRS). BioGuideSRS is an Applet that can be run from its web page on any system with Java 5.0.