Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Standards
Communications and collaboration are based on standards that span low-level file formats and
hardware signal protocols to high-level application program interfaces (APIs) and user interface
designs. Standards don't simply appear overnight, but, as illustrated in Figure 10-5 , they normally
evolve over months and years along a stepwise path from independent niche solutions to full
interoperability.
Figure 10-5. Evolution of Standards. The data uniformity stage represents
the first real instantiation of standards.
The evolution of standards normally progresses from independent niche solutions to interdependent
interoperability with multiple data sources, applications, and application areas. Niche solutions tend
to be internally focused, addressing a particular need within a lab or project, such as the need to
model a particular protein molecule. The tool and data accessibility stage of standards evolution
involves sharing among groups with a common focus or problem area, such as structure analysis.
The data uniformity stage of standards evolution involves active cooperation that may include the
formation or participation of ad hoc or formal standards organizations. The interoperability stage of
standards evolution is characterized by interaction with standards organizations outside of the
bioinformatics community.
The progression from niche solution to interoperability represents a potential path of progression.
However, most niche solutions never evolve to the tool and data accessibility stage of standards, and
fewer still progress to the data uniformity or interoperability stages of standards evolution. Consider
the characteristics of each stage of the evolution of standards in more detail in the following sections.
Niche Solutions
The path to standards typically starts as a body of niche solutions that are designed to satisfy specific
needs, without regard (or time to regard) for connectivity with other systems in order to solve other
problems. Examples of early niche solutions in bioinformatics include stand-alone dot-matrix
alignment programs that required sequence data to be either typed or pasted into the program, and
whose output had to be manually copied and pasted into other applications. Hundreds of other niche
solutions have been developed as well, from programs that perform data conversion from a particular
NMR file format to one compatible with a homegrown analysis program, to interface tools that
 
 
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