“It is usual to consider human dignity as the basis for human rights. In this sense, this term is used to refer to a number of features that characterize humans and that serve to express their uniqueness. [...] Thus, the idea of human dignity rests on a human being characterized by his or her capacity and performance in carrying out a particular social role. This has been translated into the conception of rights. Indeed, human rights theory has been founded on a model of the individual, characterized mainly by his or her “capacity” to reason, “capacity” to feel and “capacity” to communicate. It is this model that is (and which has traditionally been) the prototype of the moral agent, that is the prototype of a subject able to participate in moral discourse. [...] This is what we often refer to as moral “capacity”, being also a trait of individuals as moral agents” [1]. In recent decades advances in Assistive Technology (AT) and in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) have influenced the lives of people with disabilities or special needs. Developments in the knowledge and understanding of disability, and changes in the social and legal framework —as a result of the Rights of People with functional diversity and the Right to an Independent and Dignified Life— have led to Electronic Accessibility (e-Accessibility) and Universal Design (design for all). For years, the terminology used in the field of functional diversity resulted, more often than not, in undesirable results both at the legal level and in the sphere of political action. For this reason, since the mid 1970's people with functional diversity have voiced their objections to words such as and handicap, words which were too closely confined to a medical and diagnostic approach and which barely reflected the shortcomings and imperfections of society itself in its response to the phenomenon of disability. In 1980, the World Health Organization (WHO) [2] created the International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities, and Handicaps (ICIDH) to provide a unifying framework for classifying human functioning and disability as health components. After international revision efforts coordinated by the WHO, the World Health Assembly on May 22, 2001, approved the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF). Functioning and disability are viewed as a complex interaction between the health condition of the individual and the contextual factors of the environment as well as personal factors.

Nanocrystals of group II-VI semiconductors, known as quantum dots (QDs), in which electrons and holes are three dimensionally confined within the exciton Bohr radius of the material, are characterized by the exceptional optical properties, such as broad absorption and sharp emission bands as well as size-tunable photoluminescence in the visible spectral range. The most popular are CdSe/ZnS QDs due to their bright and unique emission with the wide excitation spectra and narrow emission bandwidths (Bailey et al., 2004; Dybiec et al., 2007; Jamieson et al., 2007; Kune et al., 2001; Norris et al., 1996; Tessler et al., 2002). The II-VI QDs have been investigated in versatile photonic applications including solar cells (Choi et al., 2006; Kongkanand et al., 2008; Lopez-Luke et al., 2008), optical fibre amplifiers (Liu et al., 2007), color displays using light-emitting diode arrays (Huang et al., 2008: Klude et al., 2002; Zhao et al., 2006), optical temperature probes (Liang et al., 2006; Walker et al., 2003), as well as in biology and medicine (Alivisatos et al., 2005; Grodzinski et al., 2006; Hoshino et al., 2007; Murcia et al., 2008; Portney & Ozkan, 2006; Wang et al., 2007). Note that metal, semiconductor, polymer and ceramic nanoparticles in general have gained essential interest for biological and medical applications (Brigger, et al., 2002). Polymer and ceramic nanoparticles have been widely used as drug carriers, whereas metal nanoclusters and semiconductor QDs have been applied mainly for imaging and therapy. Among various nanoparticles, semiconductor QDs attracted much attention due their exceptional optical properties. In comparison with organic dyes and fluorescent proteins, the semiconductor quantum-confined core/shell nanostructures, such as CdSe/ZnS QDs, are brighter, more stable against photo bleaching, have multicolor emission in dependence on core sizes and can be excited for this emission with a single light source. The size-tunable properties allow one to choose an emission wavelength that is well suited to experimental conditions and to synthesize the QD-based probe by using an appropriate semiconductor materials and nanocrystal sizes. In biology and medicine the semiconductor QDs have been used: for the fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) analysis (Bailey et al., 2004; Jamieson et al., 2007; Zhang et al., 2005), in gene technology (Gerion et al., 2002; Han et al., 2001; Pathak et al., 2001), fluorescent labeling of cellular proteins (Dubertret et al., 2002; Dubertret et al., 2003; Hanaki

Introduction 1.1 Challenges in bioinformatics data integrationThe field of biology has clearly emerged as a data intensive domain.As such, several challenges facing the design and integration systems for biological data exist [1] and continue to persist [2] despite the efforts of the bioinformatics community to reduce their impact.These challenges include 1) the large number of available databases, 2) their often http/HTML based mode of access, 3) their syntactic and semantic heterogeneity.The challenges are strongly supported by the number of increasing databases publically available-varying from 96 databases in 2001 to more than 1,330 in 2011 [3].The available databases cover different data types including nucleotide databases such as GenBank [4], protein databases such as Uniprot [5], and 3D protein structure databases such as PDB [6].While the majority of available secondary and tertiary databases are derived from primary databases such as PDB or Swissprot [7], and therefore contain redundant data, they generally provide the research community with added features resultant from studies conducted by the database providers.Parallel to the exponential increase in volume and diversity of available data, there has been an exponential increase in querying these databases as a routine task when conducting research in biology.Retrieved data is often integrated with other data produced from remote or local sources and/or manipulated using analytical tools.Consider, for example, the study of genes associated with a particular biological process or structure.An isolated DNA sequence would be screened against known gene sequences in GenBank, converted to a putative protein sequence and screened against SwissProt.Finally, any region showing similarity to a known gene or protein can then be queried for known 3D structures and be visualized using the PDB database to obtain a general idea of putative structure and function of a newly isolated gene.A subsequent search of various specialized databases would still be necessary to obtain up-to-date information regarding analogous research in other model organisms and associated pathway structures.To support the types of studies involving multiple biological databases, several integration systems have been proposed [8][9][10][11][12][13].To characterize the existing systems several dimensions have been proposed [1, 2], including the aim of integration and the integration approach.When analyzing the aim of integration, the existing systems can be largely classified as either portals-oriented or queryoriented.Portals-oriented systems have their focus on providing an integrated view to the accessed databases, where notable examples include SRS [14] and NCBI Entrez [15].Querywww.intechopen.com