Loosely Coupled Architecture for Bio-Network Reverse Engineering

Bio-network reverse engineering is inferring networks of biological entities with given observed data. In biology, our main concern is to find out the systematic architecture of biological entities and their functional role in living organisms. Thus it is very important to provide proper systematic approaches for such reverse engineering for bio-networks. Previously, we developed an information fusion platform for bio-network inference and analysis, named BioCAD. BioCAD provided a good workplace where various network inference and analysis techniques were integrated for user-specific variants of bio-network inference problems. The previous version of BioCAD has a tightly coupled architecture where the integrated usage of provided modules is available only in the form of given workflows. Even though it has provided good workplace for bio-network reverse engineering, there are some limitations in adding new modules and selective usage of provided modules. To overcome such limitations, we are designing and developing BioCAD 2.0 which has a loosely-coupled architecture. We propose our current approach of building new BioCAD 2.0 and BioCAD 2.0 will be a powerful workbench for bio-network reverse engineering.