Syllabus

GNET 712: Information Science for Bioinformatics
Instructor: Dr. Hemminger

This module covers the following main areas
Databases

  • entity relationship (ER) modeling
  • database design, creation, queries
  • we use mysql as our DBMS

Other Information Representation Schemes

  • XML, including XML notation, usage, schemas (XSD), style sheets (CSS, XSL), transformations (XLST)
  • NOSQL type databases
  • non-text database

Information Representation and Communication

  • metadata
  • controlled vocabularies
  • thesaurus
  • ontology

Information Searching

  • how people currently search; how we can do better
  • how to do information searching for biology/genome/medical domain
  • what resources are available globally and locally (UNC)

Policy for Scientific Knowledge Communications

  • Serials crisis
  • Open Access/Open Data/Open Science
  • Data Sharing Plans (NIH/NSF)

Science Data Management

  • science data repositories
  • institutional repositories
  • journal repositories


My goal for all my courses is to use only materials freely accessible to UNC students. All papers and readings except for the reference textbook are available freely online and linked from course webpages. Class notes are also freely available on class web pages.

This planned schedule lists the assignments and readings for each of the topics we'll cover. The reference textbook for this course is Elmasri, R. & Navathe, S.. Fundamentals of Database Systems 4th edition (although you can manage with any edition 3 or later). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Unless otherwise stated, the chapters listed in the schedule come from this book.