OMICtools: a community-driven search engine for biological data analysis
This addresses the problem for life scientists and developers in bioinformatics by offering a centralized platform to accelerate data analysis, though it is incremental as it builds on existing search and community-driven approaches.
The researchers tackled the challenge of locating and comparing computational biology tools amid growing data by developing OMICtools, an open-access search engine that centralizes over 18,500 manually classified software tools and databases, providing key information and community evaluations.
With high-throughput biotechnologies generating unprecedented quantities of data, researchers are faced with the challenge of locating and comparing an exponentially growing number of programs and websites dedicated to computational biology, in order to maximize the potential of their data. OMICtools is designed to meet this need with its open-access search engine offering an easy means of locating the right tools corresponding to each researcher and their specific biological data analyses. The OMICtools website (https://OMICtools.com) centralizes more than 18,500 software tools and databases, manually classified, by a team of biocurators including many scientific experts. Key information, a direct link, and access to discussions and evaluations by the biomedical community are provided for each tool. Anyone can join the OMICtools community and create a profile page, to share their expertise and comment on tools. In addition, developers can directly upload their code versions which are registered for identification and citation in scientific publications, improving research traceability. The OMICtools community links thousands of life scientists and developers worldwide, who use this bioinformatics platform to accelerate their projects and biological data analyses.