| Resumo: |
Quantitative models of biological systems provide an understanding of chemical and biological phenomena based on their underlying mechanisms. Moreover, they can be used for example, to predict the behaviour of a system under given conditions or direct future experiments. This has made quantitative models the perfect tools to answer a variety of questions in the biological sciences and has lead to a steady growth of the number of published models.

To maximise the benefits of this growing body of models, the field needs centralised model repositories that will encourage, facilitate and promote model dissemination and reuse. BioModels Database(http://www.ebi.ac.uk/biomodels/) has been developed to exactly fulfil those needs. In order to ensure the correctness of the models distributed, their structure and behaviour are thoroughly checked. To ease their understanding, the model elements are annotated with terms from controlled vocabularies as well as linked to relevant data resources. Finally, to allow their reuse, the models are provided encoded in community supported and standardised formats.

However, the modelling field is constantly evolving and data providers, like BioModels Database, are faced with new challenges. For example, models are getting more and more complex (with for instance the availability of whole organism metabolic network reconstructions) and this has a direct impact on the performance of hosting infrastructures and annotation procedures. Also, models are now being developed collaboratively: this requires new methodologies and systems, akin to the ones used in software development (with for example versioned repositories of models). Moreover, very different kinds of models are being developed by diverse communities, but ultimately their data management needs are very similar.

This talk will introduce the needs which lead to the development of BioModels Database, present the resource and its current infrastructure and finally discuss the challenges that we are facing today and the plans to overcome them.
|
