The NIH has published, in 2000, a definition of bioinformatics which is supposed to be the 'official' one:
- http://www.bisti.nih.gov/CompuBioDef.pdf
I partly disagree with that!! Or at least, I think it is incomplete.
Bioinformatics is not only providing services and tools for scientists and for analyzing data.
It is also a scientific discipline, in which you make an hypothesis, you write down your assumptions, you manage to find a way to demonstrate it, and then you share your results with other scientists and confront with them.
For example, a bioinformatics work would to demonstrate that the human genome is more complex of rat's.
That's an hypothesis (the human genome is more complex than rat's), then I write down which are my assumptions (what do I mean by 'complex', which part of the genome I am going to compare, and so on), and then, write the scripts and the tests to demonstrate whether I am right or not.
I think it should be important to point out this aspect of bioinformatics, because many people think it's only writing scripts and playing with programming languages.
What do you think? :)
