Biomedical research over the past decade has taken two directions: traditional hypothesis-generated research and the systematic collection of large data sets to build an information infrastructure for the future. During this time, databases and software tools have largely focused on enabling deep but narrow query capabilities to connect traditional laboratory investigations with genome-scale data. The outputs of functional genomics and proteomics technologies have fundamentally changed the ways in which investigators must interact with information resources. Traditional informatics approaches are now a bottleneck in a new era of discovery-driven research. Enabling higher bandwidths through this bottleneck is a major challenge for transforming complex data and information into knowledge and insights about human health and disease.