Aztec: automated biomedical tool index with improved information retrieval system

Advances in bioinformatics, especially in the field of genomics, have greatly accelerated as development of powerful computational systems and new distributed platforms enabled rapid processing of massive amounts of datasets. Accordingly, this has led to an explosion of public software, databases, and other resources for biological discovery. Modern biomedical research requires the comprehension and integration of multiple types of data and tools; specifically, understanding biomedical phenotypes requires analysis of molecular data (genomics, proteomics), imaging data (sonography; computed tomography, CT), and textual data (case reports, electronic health records). Researchers require software tools in a common platform that can analyze and integrate data from each of these domains. However, many of the existing resource and tool repositories are narrowly focused, fragmented, or scattered and do not support the multidimensional data analysis required for advancing precision medicine. There is a lack of unified platform collection software applications across various disciplines, leaving many users unable to locate the tools critical to their research. To manage this influx of digital research objects (tools and databases), the FORCE11 community put forth a set of guiding principles to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) (Wilkinson et al., 2016). While these issues have been addressed in the data elements domain, they are equally important to but thus far neglected by the biomedical informatics software domain. Here, we introduce Aztec (A to Z technology; https://aztec.bio), an open-source online software discovery platform that empowers biomedical researchers to find the software tools they need. Aztec currently hosts over 10,000 resources, spanning 17 domains including imaging, gene ontology, text mining, data visualization, and various omic analyses (i.e., genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics). Aztec serves as a common portal for biomedical software across all of these domains, enabling modern multi-dimensional characterization of biomedical processes.