抄録
We have developed the Georgia Tech Emory Networked Object Management Environment (GENOME). GENOME is a prototype database management system (DBMS)/user interface system designed to manage complex biological data, allowing users to more fully analyze and understand relationships in human genome data. The system is designed to allow the establishment of a network of searchable data sources. The DBMS portion of the environment is a hybrid object-relational system which interprets its data structures on-the-fly, resulting in an extremely flexible DBMS. Such a DBMS provides an environment for interrelating distributed data items, allowing users to further explore computational questions in biomedical science in addition to other fields by maximizing access to data. In developing GENOME, we used MITOMAP, a human mitochondrial genome database, as a model genomic database. MITOMAP encompasses one of the most complete collections of genomic data available for a specific locus or chromosome, including functional, population variation, disease mutation, and gene-gene interaction data, as well as complete sequence data for the human mitochondrial chromosome, and thus serves as an excellent model system. An effective DBMS is required for handling the plethora of Human Genome Project data to handle the various locus-specific databases and ultimately to unify all human genetic and biomedical information through the complete human genome sequence. Developing such a DBMS is our goal. We expect that GENOME will be generally applicable to other biological and non biological paradigms as well.
