A Strategy for Database Interoperation

To realize the full potential of biological databases (DBs) requires more than the interactive, hypertext flavor of database interoperation that is now so popular in the bioinformatics community. Interoperation based on declarative queries to multiple network-accessible databases will support analyses and investigations that are orders of magnitude faster and more powerful than what can be accomplished through interactive navigation. I present a vision of the capabilities that a query-based interoperation infrastructure should provide, and identify assumptions underlying, and requirements of, this vision. I then propose an architecture for query-based interoperation that includes a number of novel components of an information infrastructure for molecular biology. These components include a knowledge base that describes relationships among the conceptualizations used in different biological databases, a module that can determine the DBs that are relevant to a particular query, a module that can translate a query and its results from one conceptualization to another, a collection of DB drivers that provide uniform physical access to different database management systems, a suite of translators that can interconvert among different database schema languages, and a database that describes the network location and access methods for biological databases. A number of the components are translators that bridge the heterogeneities that exist between biological DBs at several different levels, including the conceptual level, the data model, the query language, and data formats.