Sagace: A web-based search engine for biomedical databases in Japan

BMC Research Notes

Kenji Mizuguchi²  Tohru Masui¹  Ryuichi Sakate¹  Yuki Sakaguchi¹  Chioko Nagao²  Yi-An Chen²  Maori Ito²  Yoshinobu Igarashi²  Mizuki Morita² 

[1] Department of Disease Bioresources Research, National Institute of Biomedical Innovation, 7-6-8 Saito Asagi, Ibaraki, Osaka, Japan;Department of Fundamental Research, National Institute of Biomedical Innovation, 7-6-8 Saito Asagi, Ibaraki, Osaka, Japan

关键词: Microdata;    Faceted search;    Biomedical resources;    Biomedical data;    Search engine;   

Others  :  1165334
DOI  :  10.1186/1756-0500-5-604

 received in 2012-06-11, accepted in 2012-10-19,  发布年份 2012

【 摘 要 】

Background

In the big data era, biomedical research continues to generate a large amount of data, and the generated information is often stored in a database and made publicly available. Although combining data from multiple databases should accelerate further studies, the current number of life sciences databases is too large to grasp features and contents of each database.

Findings

We have developed Sagace, a web-based search engine that enables users to retrieve information from a range of biological databases (such as gene expression profiles and proteomics data) and biological resource banks (such as mouse models of disease and cell lines). With Sagace, users can search more than 300 databases in Japan. Sagace offers features tailored to biomedical research, including manually tuned ranking, a faceted navigation to refine search results, and rich snippets constructed with retrieved metadata for each database entry.

Conclusions

Sagace will be valuable for experts who are involved in biomedical research and drug development in both academia and industry. Sagace is freely available athttp://sagace.nibio.go.jp/en/ webcite.

【 授权许可】

   
2012 Morita et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

【 图 表 】

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

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