I’m a little confused by the terms “bioinformatics”, “computational biology”, “computational science”, and others. What do all these mean?
Like any new area of research, the terminology itself needs some time to settle. Although you might find people disagreeing on the terms themselves, the unifying principle is the work on improving our understanding of life utilizing resources outside of what has traditionally been done. Another theme you’ll find is that data plays a prominent role—a lot of data. Thus, bioinformatics includes even the creation, design, and implementation of informatics systems—typically DBMSs—to help manage the massive amounts of data. A third theme you’ll encounter is search. In bioinformatics we spend a great deal of time searching through the data—and that’s probably no surprise.
