The aim of our Bioinformatics Tool Discovery System is to address some of the Bioinformatics educational challenges by creating a comprehensive, annotated Bioinformatics analytic query tool library.

The Bioinformatics Tool Discovery System (Bio-TDS) is comprised of a list of tool descriptions gathered from Galaxy , iPlant Collaborative , Bioinformatics Link Directory which contains the Nucleic Acid Research Tool List, SEQAnswers, and Bio-Soft Net by leveraging their respective API functionality.

An ontology annotation system has been added to the BLT to enable robust searching capabilities. The ontologies to be integrated into the annotation system are: EDAM , SWO, and NGSOnto. EDAM is an ontology of concepts that are prevalent within bioinformatics, including types of data, data identifiers, data formats, operations and topics (http://edamontology.org/). The Software Ontology (SWO) is a resource for describing analytic tools, their types, tasks, versions, data requirements and provenance (http://theswo.sourceforge.net/). NGSOnto is an ontology to describe workflows from DNA extraction to contigs in a Whole Genome Sequence experiment (http://darwin.phyloviz.net/~msilva/NGSonto/).