The Use of Object–Oriented Datamodels for Biomolecular Databases

New biochemical and computational methods have led to an explosion in the available biomolecular data. Thus the management of large databases has become one of the important applications of computational tools in biomolecular research. From a data management viewpoint the main difficulties in managing biomolecular data are related only to a minor degree to the quantity of available data. Databases of much larger sizes are common in many application areas. The challenge is to deal with the complexity of the data with respect to the data structures, integrity constraints and algorithms. Thus conventional data management approaches, like file–based data management or relational database management systems, are not able to deal adequately with the typical requirements of biomolecular data management in general, despite of the fact that they are frequentely used to cover certain applications of the area. Thus the interest has risen in using object–oriented data models and data base systems for biomolecular data management. Object–oriented data models were especially developed to satisfy requirements from application areas where data and operations are intrinsically complex, like engineering, science or document management.