Bioinformatics knowledge model

The TAMBIS Project (Transparent Access to Multiple Bioinformatics Information Sources) [Baker et al. 1991] started in the late 1990s at the University of Manchester and has developed a powerful data model together with a knowledge base affording near-natural language queries to federated distributed biological databases. 

The computational approaches to predict protein structures from their amino acid sequences can be either empirical or knowledge-based. The former involves calculations of the energetically favorable structures by the use of the parameterized force fields (section 9.2) and the latter performs statistical analysis with references to the existing structures employing ranges of bioinformatic techniques (section 16.5). The comparative structural analysis leads to homologous models, which are then refined by energy minimization. 

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