A Framework for Querying Pedigree Data

Genealogy information is becoming increasingly abundant in light of modern genetics and the study of diseases and risk factors. As the volume of this structured pedigree data expands, there is a pressing need for better ways to manage, store, and efficiently query this data. Building on recent advances in semi-structured data management and proven relational database technology, we propose a general-purpose pedigree query language (PQL) and evaluation framework for elegantly expressing and efficiently evaluating queries on this data. In this paper, we describe how the problem of modeling and querying pedigree data differs from XML, present an overview of PQL, and present efficient evaluation for key parts of the language. Experimental results using real data show significant (>850%) performance improvement for complex queries over naive evaluation