APPLICATIONS OF FUZZY LOGIC IN BIOINFORMATICS. © Imperial College Press …

1.1 What Is Bioinformatics

As we enter the information age, we witness the impact of computers and computation in almost every corner of our lives. Many people in the world retrieve and broadcast information through the Internet. The weather forecast is made through extensive computation on supercomputers. Stocks are traded electronically. Airplanes are designed completely on computers before the first component is ever manufactured. We also witness substantial impact of computers and computation on biological and medical research, and this impact led to the birth of bioinformatics.
Although bioinformatics is a popular term in science and technology, there is no consensus for its definition. As a new field, its precise definition will take many years to finalize. A current semi-official definition for bioinformatics by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is “Research, development, or application of computational tools and approaches for expanding the use of biological, medical, behavioral or health data, including those to acquire, represent, describe, store, analyze, or visualize such data” (http://www.bisti.nih.gov/). A related field, computational biology, is defined by NIH as “the development and application of data-analytical and theoretical methods, mathematical modeling and computational simulation techniques to the study of biological, behavioral, and social systems”. From these definitions, bioinformatics is focused on technology (engineering) for developing tools and infrastructure, while computational biology is more about
science (biology) to generate hypotheses in understanding nature.
Although the distinction between bioinformatics and computational biology is made by NIH and others, there is no doubt that the two fields are tightly coupled. Hence, the terms bioinformatics and computational biology are sometimes used interchangeably. For example, the definition of bioinformatics by Luscombe et al. [2001] includes some scope of computational biology specified by NIH, but restricts itself to the biomolecular aspect: “bioinformatics is conceptualizing biology in terms of macromolecules (in the sense of physical-chemistry) and then applying “informatics” techniques (derived from disciplines such as applied math, computer science, and statistics) to understand and organize the information associated with these molecules, on a large-scale.”
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