Dear all,
I would like to propose a dedicated mailing list for the usage of PostgreSQL
in biological/biomedical application - a good name might be "pgsql-bio".
a little background:
In biomedical research, there are often two main sources of data:
On the one hand, locally-produced experimental data from an ever-growing array
of data-spewing machinery (e.g. high-throughput sequencing; mass spectrometry;
microarrays).
On the other hand, there are large biomedical databases freely downloadable
(e.g.: NCBI; ensembl.org; hapmap.org; many, many others). (science
publications are increasingly obliged to provide (raw) data as well.)
Work for the (database) programmer often involves joining the locally produced
experimental data to (local copies of) the huge public databases. (Biologists
refer to this as "annotation").
The preparation of such "annotation" databases can be the same for many
research groups.
In combination with the possibility of example code on a bioinformatics
section of the wiki, a mailing list could provide a platform to discuss ways
to prepare such databases, & their respective applications.
Thanks,
Erik Rijkers
Erasmus University Medical Center
Rotterdam (Netherlands)