Research Seminar - October 19, 2001

Abstract:

In the face of the explosion of biological data, researchers hope to ask complex questions to understand the mechanisms of disease and accelerate the development of diagnostics and therapeutics through the integration of biological data.

However, biomedical databases are distributed around the world, varying in platform, operating system, database management system and programming language. How to handle these data, make sense of them, and render them accessible to biologists working on a wide variety of problems presents a challenge.

We have designed and implemented a genotype web application system (dbGT) for the Asthma and Allergy Research Institute, UWA. This system allows transparent interconnection between dbGT and two other databases: a Single Nucleotide Polymorphism database (dbSNP) distributed by the National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and the EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratory) Nucleotide Sequence Database at the European Molecular Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). This paper describes the ontology and database schema of dbGT. It also presents a three-tier architecture which involves the use of Java servlet, JDBC, CORBA and XML technologies to develop the integrated system.