Lost and Found in Behavioral Informatics

From early anatomical lesion studies to the molecular and cellular methods of today, a wealth of technologies have provided increasingly sophisticated strategies for identifying and characterizing the biological basis of behaviors. Bioinformatics is a growing discipline that has emerged from the practical needs of modern biology, and the history of systematics and ontology in data integration and scientific knowledge construction. This revolution in biology has resulted in a capability to couple the rich molecular, anatomical, and psychological assays with advances in data dissemination and integration. However, behavioral science poses unique challenges for biology and medicine, and many unique resources have been developed to take advantage of the strategies and technologies of an informatics approach. The collective developments of this diverse and interdisciplinary field span the fundamentals of database development and data integration, ontology development, text mining, genetics, genomics, high-throughput analytics, image analysis and archiving, and numerous others. For the behavioral sciences, this provides a fundamental shift in our ability to associate and dissociate behavioral processes and relate biological and behavioral entities, thereby pinpointing the biological basis of behavior.