Report of the Workshop on Interconnection of Molecular Biology Databases

There is tremendous synergy between the roughly existing molecular biology databases Once these databases are interconnected biologists will be able to integrate diverse sources of information to answer questions that are laborious or impossible to tackle today This NSF funded workshop brought bioinformatics researchers and users of molecular biology databases together with computer science specialists in database interoperation The workshop surveyed existing molecular biology databases and the requirements for interoperation among them Computer scientists presented an overview of the database operation problem and of techniques for solving it Participants described a wide range of approaches to interoperation of molecular biology databases that are generating practical results Existing systems allow multidatabase queries to databases such as Genbank GDB and PDB There now exists no single nal resolution to the interoperation problem Current approaches di er along a variety of dimensions including ability to handle complex queries di culty of implementation required user expertise and scalability An understanding of these dimensions is important when deciding what techniques to employ for a given scienti c community The workshop identi ed a number of barriers to interoperation such as resistance to standards inaccessibility of existing databases to structured query via Internet and poor documentation of many databases But interoperation is proceeding at a rapid pace that promises to fuel scienti c discovery