Metabolic Information Control System

Systems for the integration of data in molecular biology are becoming more and more important because scientists as well as applications can not always find all relevant data in one database. Another advantage of data integration is the possibility to derive information of a new quality using semantic relations between the integrated data of various databases. With the requirement to feed an application for the simulation of metabolic pathways with necessary data we are developing a system for the integration which is based on a hybrid approach. As a first possibility a datawarehouse is used for an easy and fast access. The storage system of this datawarehouse is an object oriented database system. The second possibility of our hybrid approach of integration is the capability of a homogeneous online access to various data sources such as database systems and flat file based systems via the internet. The components for the data access are modular. Thus they can be created and modified easily using a semi-automatic process. Therefore a mediator based system is available for the integration of data stored in databases and flat files. The applications can access the integrated data via various interfaces such as CORBA, JDBC or TCP/IP.