Welcome to the Center for Information Sciences and Databases

 

The Center for Information Sciences and Databases (CISD) is an associated scientific unit of the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE), a member group of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) and participates in the Swiss national Systems Biology initiative SystemsX.ch. Its mission is to establish and ensure simple, reliable access to data of high quality and consistency with sufficient context to enable and support knowledge generation in Systems Biology.
As a focused group of interdisciplinary experts, CISD is to provide an effective scientific service bridging the gap between life science research and information technologies enabling cross-disciplinary research. Simple, scalable and consistent storage and management of information is a key to successful research projects and collaborations. CISD's focus lies on increasing data

 

• quality by supporting and developing quality assessment tools
• consistency by supporting data standardization to enable data comparability
• accessibility by enabling all SystemsX.ch RTD projects to manage their project data and to easily retrieve information and report findings
• comparability of complementing experimental platforms by working towards an integration of different technologies and data
• interpretability by supporting and developing statistical analyses, visualization and modeling tools, by placing results in their biological context, by systematic annotation of experiments and biological observables, by clear semantics of data and biological entities.

 

Both within SystemsX.ch and in other large research consortia the development of a computational platform faces challenges such as

 

• How to best leverage computational biology resources
• How to cope with the large amounts of experimental data produced in different labs
• How to most effectively support & enable data interpretability
• How to establish & maintain effective participation in scientific projects