Sébastien Ferré

Introduction to logical information systems

Logical information systems (LIS) use logic in a uniform way to describe their contents, to query it, to navigate through it, to analyze it, and to maintain it. They can be given an abstract specification that does not depend on the choice of a particular logic, and concrete instances can be obtained by instantiating this specification with a particular logic. In fact, a logic plays in a LIS the role of a schema in databases. We present the principles of LIS, the constraints they impose on the expression of logics, and hints for their effective implementation.

BLID: An Application of Logical Information Systems to Bioinformatics

BLID (Bio-Logical Intelligent Database) is a bioinformatic system designed to help biologists extract new knowledge from raw genome data by providing high-level facilities for both data browsing and analysis. We describe BLID’s novel data browsing system which is based on the idea of Logical Information Systems. This enables combined querying and navigation of data in BLID (extracted from public bioinformatic repositories). The browsing language is a logic especially designed for bioinformatics. It currently includes sequence motifs, taxonomies, and macromolecule structures, and it is designed to be easily extensible, as it is composed of reusable components. Navigation is tightly combined with this logic, and assists users in browsing a genome through a form of human-computer dialog.