INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR BIOCHEMICAL INFORMATION

An information management system for managing biochemical information (200). The biochemical information (200) comprises data sets (202) and each data set comprises a variable value matrix containing variable values organized as rows and columns; a row description list, in a variable description language, of the rows in the variable value matrix; a column description list, in a variable description language, of the columns in the variable value matrix; and a fixed dimension description, in a variable description language, of one or more fixed dimensions that are common to all values in the variable value matrix. A benefit achieved by storing the numerical values as a scalar matrix is that the matrix can be analyzed with many commercially available data-mining tools, such as self-organizing maps or other clustering algorithms, that do not readily process dimensioned values.