Bioinformatics

Concluding Remarks

As the first book focusing on management systems for biological data, this material is a detailed introduction to the variety of problems and issues facing data integration and the presentation of numerous systems. The major issue these systems are trying to address is the large number of distributed, semantically disparate data sources that need to be combined into a useful and usable system for geneticists and biologists to perform their research. This issue is complicated by the variety of data formats, inconsistent semantics, and custom interfaces supported by these sources—as well as the highly dynamic nature of these characteristics and the data themselves. Ideally, a data integration system would provide consistent ...