The system can be used with any type of data and is
particularly suited for providing 'data mining' like searches of complex
descriptive data. BioMart comes with an 'out of the box' website that can be installed,
configured and customised according to user requirements.
Additional access is provided by graphical and text based applications or
programmatically using web services or API written in Perl and Java. BioMart plugins are also available to access mart data sources using third party tools such as Galaxy, Taverna and biomaRt (BioConductor). BioMart has built-in support for query optimisation and data federation. The
process of converting a data source into BioMart format is fully automated
by the tools included in the package.
Currently supported RDBMS platforms are MySQL, Oracle and Postgres.
BioMart is completely Open Source, licensed under the LGPL, and freely
available to anyone without restrictions.
