Computers and the internet have revolutionized everything from agriculture and architecture to research. Biological research is no exception. Biology is the science of studying living beings. Bioinformatics is the use of techniques from applied mathematics, informatics, statistics, and computer science to solve biological problems. It is the science of using information to understand biology.

Long before the invention of the word bioinformatics, researchers tried to use computers to assist in their research. These researcher realized three concepts which are still fundamental to bioinformatics today.

• data representation
• the concept of similarity
• bioinformatics is a data-driven science as opposed to theoretical science

To make it possible for a computer to work on a problem. This problem must be abstracted in a computer understandable format. This often requires simplification of the problem and coding. Computers can be very clever at detecting similarity and similarity allows us to imply that two seemly different entities share a certain property. Bioinformatics is a data driven science meaning that we require lots of data. Fortunately, the biggest problem is not the lack of data but the quality of data, meaningful classification of data and our insufficient capacity to interpret the data.