Bioagent: a mobile agent system for bioscientists

The postgenomic era is characterized by the large amount of data available from sequencing experi- ments. Each scientific institute works on differ- ent projects; therefore, data increases rapidly as do the difficulties in managing and sharing information among all potential users. Browsing and searching are expensive activities because extensive time is re- quired to locate the appropriate information. To sup- port the daily work of a bioscientist, we propose to use mobile agent, a computational unit capable of migrating to different places from any location. We then introduce BioAgent, a mobile agent-based sys- tem aiming at: 1) complete decentralization of local tasks processing that presently characterizes a work- flow of an experiment; 2) reduction of network traffic, thereby freeing researchers from network faults dur- ing the experiment, and 3) freeing bioscientists from the need for continuous connection to a laptop. The system is simple, modular, easy to use and imple- mented in Java.