DESCRIPTION
Progress in biomedical research and healthcare requires taking advantage of the huge amount of biological knowledge and clinical data that already exists and is being generated incrementally. The management and exploitation of this wealth of information requires the development and implementation of adequate computational approaches, usually labelled as bioinformatics. The scientific advancement in bioinformatics methods and applications during the last years has been impressive, but their practical impact in the medical field is still limited for several reasons, which include: 1) the deficit of integrative approaches that effectively combine different types of data from different sources; and 2) the lack of active involvement of the end-users that are not experts in bioinformatics in the design of the applications, with the aim of making them easily understandable and usable.