Systems Biology Warehousing: Challenges and Strategies toward Effective Data Integration
Abstract
The rapid development of genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and structural genomics techniques have provided an unprecedented amount of data, enabling system-wide biological research. Although information integration has been well investigated in database theory research, biological data present numerous challenges from the lack of standard formats to data inconsistencies resulting from experimental data variations. Satisfying and practical solutions are still lacking and current molecular biology databases serve primarily as simple data repositories with limited query capabilities. They also provide little to no integration with other databases. However, the success of systems biology is contingent on the ability to integrate and utilize a wide variety of types of data and computational techniques to automatically predict and assign functional annotations of proteins as effective integration of biological data should enable scientists to perform comparative analyses, modelling and inference of proteins' functions. Therefore, there is a need for a paradigm shift toward systems biology databases with flexible query systems that focus on answering a diversity of questions from biologists without the need to constantly reconfigure the underlying database architectures.
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