Optimized Seamless Integration of Biomolecular Data

Abstract

Today, scientific data is inevitably digitized, stored in a wide variety of heterogeneous formats, and is accessible over the Internet. Scientists need to access an integrated view of multiple remote or local heterogeneous data sources. They then integrate the results of complex queries and apply further analysis and visualization to support the task of scientific discovery. Building such a digital library for scientific discovery requires accessing and manipulating data extracted from flat files or databases, documents retrieved from the Web, as well as data that is locally materialized in warehouses or is generated by software. We consider several tasks to provide optimized and seamless integration of biomolecular data. Challenges to be addressed include capturing and representing source capabilities; developing a methodology to acquire and represent semantic knowledge and metadata about source contents, overlap in source contents, and access costs; and decision support to select sources and capabilities using cost based and semantic knowledge, and generating low cost query evaluation plans. (Also referenced as UMIACS-TR-2001-51)