Preface

Biological data is scattered all over the world across thousands of biological databases and hundreds of scientific journals. To complicate matters, state of the art high-throughput technologies generate additional large quantities of high dimensional data increasingly rapidly. Integrative Bioinformatics aims at capturing, modelling, integrating, analysing, and visualising this data in a consistent way to provide new and deeper insights into complex biological systems. This field covers a wide range of techniques and developments such as databases and information systems, data integration, modelling and simulation, network analysis, and data and text mining in many application areas such as biology, medical informatics, agriculture, biomedicine, biotechnology and integrative approaches for drug design