A large number of resources are already iTools-accessible to the community and this infrastructure is rapidly growing. iTools provides a system for classification, categorization and integration of different computational biology resources across space-and-time scales, biomedical problems, computational infrastructures and mathematical foundations.
The iTools design, implementation and resource meta - data content reflect the broad research, computational, applied and scientific expertise available at the seven National Centers for Biomedical Computing. Specifically, iTools stores information about three types of resources–data, software tools and web-services. We describe a new infrastructure, iTools, for managing the query, traversal and comparison of diverse computational biology resources. There is an explosion in algorithms and tools for computational biology, which makes it difficult for biologists to find, compare and integrate such resources. The advancement of the computational biology field hinges on progress in three fundamental directions – the development of new computational algorithms, the availability of informatics resource management infrastructures and the capability of tools to interoperate and synergize.
