Lilian Hunt asks
what exactly is this group for?
It's a bit of a historical artifact, Lilian. The "Biomatrix" was an idea
promoted by Harold Morowitz in the mid 1980s (then of Yale, now a University
Professor at George Mason University) about applying artificial intelligence
methods to build and manipulate "knowledge bases" of biological
information. There were a couple of workshops at the Santa Fe Institute, and
some conferences, as well as a "Biomatrix society" that published a
newsletter for a while. There was also an Institute of Medicine report on
"Models for Biology", published c. 1987 that discussed the idea.
Although I wasn't at the Santa Fe workshops (1986 & '87, I think), I did go
to the conferences, and was a member of the society. It's been largely
superceded by fast moving events in computational biology in the last few
years, but the newsgroup lives on.
--
Lawrence Hunter, Ph.D.
Chief, Molecular Statistics and Bioinformatics email: lhunter at nih.gov
National Cancer Institute phone: +1 (301) 402-0389
Federal Building, Room 3C06 fax: +1 (301) 480-0223
Bethesda, MD 20892 USA
