ABSTRACT

The Internet represents an ideal platform for the retrieval, exchange, and computing of the voluminous, heterogeneous, and constantly evolving and expanding body of genetic information. The genome research community was indeed an early adopter of the Web and computer technology. While it was the complexity, heterogeneity, and size of the data, which led to the extensive use of the computer and the WWW by the genome research community, bioinformatics itself has grown rapidly into a distinct field of science. Biologists, computer scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians are finding a previously non-existing common ground of interaction and areas of mutual interest. It is also because of this interesting common ground of biology, computers, and mathematics that many newcomers to the field of genomic research are baffled when they encounter many of the unfamiliar methods and terminology. This chapter serves as an introduction to the rich WWW resources on bioinformatics for those new to the field.