A federated DBMS-based integrated environment for molecular biology

Interest in database support for scientific information management has been considerably growing in the recent past. We look into one specific scientific area, i.e. molecular biology. The analysis of the current molecular biology working environment consisting of various independent software components shows several shortcomings and thus leads to requirements for an integrated working environment. We propose an architecture for an integrated system, the centre of which is a federated database system, the data repository. Its main benefits are a central data administration, a uniform data representation, the possibility of data reuse, and ad hoc query facilities. In addition, new application tools can be implemented on top of the repository easily and thus much faster than today