**4. Conclusion**

As outlined in this chapter, Informatics has acquired a great importance not only in the biological sciences, but in all areas of knowledge. Internet has become one of the most important tools for most people, from a dedicated researcher interested in the latest advances in his/her particular field of work to the teenager trying to contact his friends. Companies, industries and research institutes developed sites, where they expose their work to laymen.

The large number of publicly available databases and computational tools that have been developed, dedicated to organize, integrate, and provide efficient access to the ever-increasing amount of biological information produced over decades of research, have benefited research‐ ers all over the world, especially those from low-income countries.

One important drawback, that still has to be overcome, is that the wealth of biological information available is presently fragmented, dispersed across numerous computational resources, and is redundant in many circumstances, clearly requiring unification in order to provide a global and integral picture of the biological systems they are dedicated to.

Ideally, the upcoming databases and computational tools should offer: data integration, providing multi-perspective analyses; combine *in silico* generated and manually curated data, improving the quality of our research; present efficient data structure, storage and processing, providing dynamic, flexible and fast data visualization, data searching, data retrieval and data analysis, via user-friendly graphical interfaces; implement a consistent and controlled vocabulary to describe the data and standardized data formats, providing full data inter‐ changing and integration with other data sources. We believe that only in this way, a fruitful field for interactions and cooperation among researches from distinct areas might emerge, providing the required support to interpret and analyze this wealth of data according to a truly multidisciplinary approach.

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