Methods to access structured and semi-structured data in bioinformatics databases: A perspective

There are several methods proposed to extract data from biological databases developed by bioinformatics experts. These methods retrieve bioinformatics information through the use of structured and semi-structured data tools from remote database servers. This paper investigates and evaluates the performance of these methods in terms of their ability to gain access to a cross representation of bioinformatics databases efficiently using web-based interfaces provided by bioinformatics organizations. The investigation distinguishes these approaches and tools. We have used the Sequence Retrieval System and Entrez search tools for structured data, and the Perl and BioPerl for semi-structured data to retrieve complex queries data and a combination of text and numeric information. The use of semi-structured data tools for accessing bioinformatics databases has been found viable alternative to the structured approach.