Structural biology is a basic medical science dedicated to understanding the function of the body in terms of its three-dimensional organization. Since both normal and abnormal function are fundamentally determined by structure a knowledge base of structural biology should lead to causally-based problem-solving modules in basic science and clinical medicine. Such a knowledge base, and the associated knowledge-based systems, will be large and will need to be developed and coordinated through many research groups. We describe a distributed framework for allowing such sharing to take place, in which individual modules running on widely scattered and diverse machines are made available as knowledge and data servers communicating via remote procedure calls or similar mechanisms. We also describe potential modules for structural biology and present results from our current modules for computing three-dimensional anatomic reconstructions from serial sections.
展开▼
