ABSTRACT
The high volume and complexity of data generated by DNA microarrays has created both opportunities and challenges for bioinformaticians and computational biologists as the large-scale analysis of expression data requires advanced database, computational, and statistical approaches. One such approach seeks the seamless interoperation of different data sources and analytic tools that are used for analyzing
DAAL: “dk2187_c016” — 2005/10/7 — 19:03 — page 306 — #2
microarray data. Despite the advent of integration technologies such as web technology and database connectivity (DBC) technologies (e.g., Open DBC and Java DBC), the heterogeneous nature of these data sources, analytic tools, and microarray data measurement methods poses a major challenge to their interoperation. In general, there are two types of heterogeneities, namely syntactic heterogeneities and semantic heterogeneities.
