Conclusion

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The Human Genome Project has brought the field of biology over a high mountain pass and into a new, huge, unexplored, lush valley. We are standing at a precipice overlooking this valley and the wonders of what lies ahead are just beginning to sink in. It is like standing at a high vantage point in the early 1950s, overlooking what was ahead for the electronics industry. We are in a time of explosive growth in terms of knowledge and understanding of biological systems. The complexity of living organisms and the inherent information contained within is staggering. The tools we bring to bear to explore, discover, manipulate, and work with this new information will make an enormous difference in how fast and efficiently we are able to build this new information into knowledge and understanding.

XML is well suited and provides an excellent standard for capturing and expressing complex biological information. XML is a flexible, extensible information model that supports the heterogeneous characteristics of biological information and will grow with the discovery process. In order to support a growing knowledge base and the discovery process, the database technology must be as flexible, extensible, and schema independent as the XML information model. The database technology must work well with and support extremely heterogeneous information. NeoCore XMS uniquely meets these requirements. Through NeoCore's association with the UC Denver's Center for Computational Biology, NeoCore XMS is proving to meet the demands of the biological research community. The addition of a BLAST sequence search engine to NeoCore XMS further enhances the database's value in the exploding field of biology and life sciences. The ability to capture, manipulate, analyze, and grow the information discovered in the lush biological valley ahead will allow us to gain knowledge and understanding of the complex systems that make up living organisms. The gains here have the potential to revolutionize medicine.


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Part IV: Applications of XML