The HOBIT initiative is dedicated to form the core of a network linking bioinformatic centres together. It shall be understood as an initial organisational and technological platform for interconnection of bioinformatics activities. The aim of the network is to concatenate applications and resources in a uniform way so providing an efficient communication tier between for bioinformatics resource access.Commonly bioinformatics resources are highly localized and only accessible via interactive web pages. This causes several disadvantages. It complicates for example the possibility to integrate external resources in local applications. As a result this leads very often to redundant installations of external applications and databases. Consequential information may diverge especially in databases if additional information is generated. Beside this a significant administrative overhead is required. Other problems are for example no uniform access mechanisms for information and the requirement to deal with different technologies.

Bielefeld University Bioinformatics Service
Cologne University Bioinformatics Center
DKFZ Heidelberg, Department of Molecular Biophysics
Freie Universität Berlin, Algorithmic Bioinformatics Group
GBF Braunschweig, Department of Genome Analysis
Georg-August University Göttingen, Department of Bioinformatics
GSF Munich, MIPS, Institute for Bioinformatics
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Teaching and Research Unit Bioinformatics
MDC/EMBL Heidelberg, Comparative Sequence Analysis
MDC Berlin, Bioinformatics Department
University of Würzburg, Institute of Bioinformatics

Jan Krüger, Henning Mersch, Alexander Sczyrba

October 2003

3 Years

Präsidentenfonds of the HGF