Bielefeld Institute for Bioinformatics Infrastructure

Powerful Alliance for the Life Sciences

The Information Centre for Life Sciences (ZB MED) in Cologne follows a long tradition of licensing and delivering scientific journal articles and scholarly books to researchers in Medicine, agricultural sciences (subsidiary located at the University of Bonn) and life sciences in general. The transformation of the scientific journals towards digital and open access publications and in the same way in recent years for scholarly books have changed the community involvement of ZB MED and is leading to a portfolio of services that support digital delivery of content. These developments are well aligned with the collection and delivery of digital data from the scientific community to the scientific community, which requires an IT Infrastructure and forms the next generation of information delivery.

The Bielefeld Institute for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (BIBI) and ZB MED in Cologne form a strategic alliance, since both institutes deliver IT services into the scientific community in the life sciences and provide complementary solutions that complete each other’s portfolio of solutions. Whereas ZB MED is focused on the delivery of content, BIBI advances cloud-based analytical solutions for the life sciences that can make efficient use of the content available at ZB MED. Both make use of large-scale IT infrastructure, however ZB MED enriches its content with semantics technologies whereas BIBI analyses large sets of OMICS data, e.g., for biomedical research.

 

Researchers from BIBI and ZB MED are well established in the life science research community, in bioinformatics as well as medical informatics and agricultural research.

Scientifically they can cover the full range of computer science, bioinformatics, medical informatics, semantics technologies, e.g., generation and use of terminologies and ontologies, and machine learning (including deep learning and AI). Together they provide solutions that cover the complete research life cycle of life science research: a unique combination of literature and information supply including computational analysis of big data. This enables new scientific insights for researchers of all life science disciplines as well as bioinformatics.

BIBI introduces modern infrastructures and additional bioinformatics expertise into the broad repertoire of ZB MED. The strategic alliance of ZB MED and BIBI implements numerous new services: bioinformatics compute solutions, cloud computing, data science training, and the graduate school “Digital Infrastructure for the Life Sciences” (DILS).