Conducting bioinformatic analyses involves biologists in expressing requests over a range of highly heterogeneous information sources and software tools. Such activities are laborious, and require detailed knowledge of the data structures and call interfaces of the different sources. The TAM-BIS (Transparent Access to Multiple Bioinformatics Information Sources) project seeks to make the diversity in data structures, call interfaces and locations of bioinformatics sources transparent to users.

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... n TAMBIS, queries are expressed in terms of an ontology implemented using a description logic, and queries over the ontology are rewritten to a middleware level for execution over the diverse sources. This paper describes query processing in TAMBIS, focusing in particular on the way source-independent concepts in the ontology are related to source-dependent middleware calls, and describing how the planner identifies efficient ways of evaluating user queries.