SBFC - The Systems Biology Format Converter Framework

Abstract

The System Biology Format Converter (SBFC) aims is to provide a generic framework that potentially allows any conversion between two formats. Interoperability between formats is a recurring issue in Systems Biology. Although there are various tools available to convert models from one format to another, most of them have been independently developed and cannot easily be combined, specially to provide support for more formats. The framework is written in Java and can be used as a standalone executable. Recently a prototype has been developed with OSGi to achieve a more modular framework structure. This is a collaborative project and we hope that developers will provide support for more formats by creating new modules. SBFC allows anyone to easily add new converters and to integrate existing converters with a minimum of changes. We will also allow to combine several existing converters.