earticle

영어

This paper surveys some researches to accomplish on bioinformatics. These researches wish to propose a database architecture combining a general view of bioinformatics data as a graph of data objects and data relationships, with the efficiency and robustness of data management and query provided by indexing and generic programming techniques. Here, these invert the role of the index, and make it a first-class citizen in the query language. It is possible to do this in a structured way, allowing users to mention indexes explicitly without yielding to a procedural query model, by converting functional relations into explicit functions. In the limit, the database becomes a graph, in which the edges are these indexes. Function composition can be specified either explicitly or implicitly as path queries. The net effect of the inversion is to convert the database into a hyperdatabase: a database of databases, connected by indexes or functions. The inversion approach was motivated by their work in biological databases, for which hyperdatabases are a good model. The need for a good model has slowed progress in bioinformatics.