A Web Crawler for Automated Location of Genomic Resources

Student: Steven James Mayocchi

Supervisor: M Ragan

Category: Computer Systems Engineering Thesis Project

The purpose of this project is to develop a Web Crawler based software package that will locate and then download genomic data. A Web Crawler is a software package that searches the internet for particular strings of interest. The Web Crawler being developed here works by seeking out files in a set of webpages and then downloading them if they are of interest to the user. Whether the files are of interest to the user depends on the application. In this case the files of interest are Genomic Resources.

The majority of people will have heard of the human genome project where the entire Human DNA sequence has been obtained. This sequence is an example of a Genomic Resource. Essentially what is sought with genomic resources are files that contain sequence data. In this application these files are downloaded by the software.

The final software package that has been developed has been written in the script language Perl and also has a graphical user interface written in Tk. The software works to locate and download the files of interest.

Poster Presentation (PDF)

Thesis Document (PDF)