Database and R Interfacing for Annotated Microarray Data

A framework for expression data repositories (MAGE-ML compatiblity) emerged during the last years. Focus is now shifting towards the integration of expression databases into genomic and other bioinformatic database system as well as with statistical analysis platforms. We present an implementation of such a repository system at MIPS (http://mips.gsf.de/). An important requirement for this integration is a flexible and fast interface between the DBMS and the statistical environment. This interface must handle not only expression values but also a broad variety of annotation. Therefore, we have implemented the interface employing template programming with the Oracle Template Library (OTL).