Biological Data Management: Research, Practice and Opportunities Thodoros Topaloglou, Susan B. Davidson, H. V. Jagadish, Victor M. Markowitz, Evan W. Steeg, and Mike Tyers   View Paper (PDF)   Return to PANELS Abstract Biological research and drug development are routinely producing terabytes of data that need to be organized, queried and reduced to useful scientific knowledge. Although data management technology can provide solutions to problems, in practice the data needs of biomedical research are not well served. The goal of this panel is to expose the barriers blocking the effective application of advanced data management technology to biological data. The current state of biological data management ranges from "malpractice" of database principles, to the reinvention of well-known data management methods, to the contribution of valuable new ideas to the state of the art in database research. On the other side, database research is often incompatible with the production requirements of the biomedical data operations: integration and interoperability of biological data sources, support for more meaningful data types, domain-aware querying interfaces, practical workflow management, and methods for evaluating data quality including data provenance are still considered open problems in biological data management, just as a decade ago. Our panelists bring wealth of experience in translating database research into biological data management tools and in communicating data requirements back to the database community. They will identify and debate the key challenges and opportunities to which the database community should contribute. ©2005 Association for Computing Machinery