
Chapter 8
Data Technologies
8.1 Introduction
Handling data efficiently and effectively is an essential task in Bioinformat-
ics. In this chapter we present some of the many tools that are available for
dealing with data. The R Data Import/Export Manual (R Development Core
Team, 2007a) should also be consulted for other topics and in many cases for
more details regarding different technologies and their interfaces in R. The
solution to many bioinformatic tasks will require some use of web-oriented
technologies. Generating requests, posting and reading forms data, as well as
lo cating and using web services are programming tasks that are likely to arise.
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