Bioinformatics, Vol 14, 486-497, Copyright © 1998 by Oxford University Press
KH Cheung, PM Nadkarni and DG Shin
MOTIVATION: Molecular biology databases have been proliferating rapidly.
Their heterogeneity and complexity pose a great challenge to efforts in
database interoperation. To minimize the efforts of interoperating
heterogeneous databases, it is useful to develop a system that lets a user
of a particular genomic database access another related database as if the
latter is structurally similar to the former. RESULTS: We extend a
structurally simple model-the entity- attribute-value (EAV) model-to
describe uniformly metadata relating to individual databases. Such
metadata, which are necessary for performing database comparisons, include
descriptions of primitive database objects (including entities, attributes,
domain values and entity relationships) and specification of
correspondences among the database objects. We show how to decompose SQL
queries and map them from one database to another based on the EAV
representation of the basic database objects. A prototype system is
implemented to demonstrate query interoperation between two chromosome map
databases. AVAILABILITY: Freely available (Cold Fusion source code and an
Access database containing the mapping knowledge) upon request from the
author. CONTACT: kei.cheung@yale.edu
ARTICLES
A metadata approach to query interoperation between molecular biology databases
Center for Medical Informatics, Yale University School of Medicine, 333 Cedar Street, TMP-3, New Haven, CT 06510, USA. kei.cheung@yale.edu
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