Designing a Global Information Resource for Molecular Biology.

Abstract

. Research in molecular biology is continuously producing an immense amount of data, but this information is spread over numerous heterogeneous data repositories. Their integration into a federated information system would drastically reduce the time a biologist has to spend browsing different WWW sites or databases in search for a particular piece of information. In this study we point out the specific problems that molecular biology is posing to data integration. We present our approach to cope with these problems. It is based on a mediator architecture and uses query correspondence assertions (QCA) to describe sources in a flexible yet expressive manner. QCAs both capture content and query capabilities of arbitrary data sources with respect to a federated schema. Based on such QCAs a mediator can answer queries against the federated schema by constructing semantically equivalent combinations of source queries. 1. Introduction Since the start of the Human Genome Project in the mid 8...