Research On The Key Technology Of Metadata-based Integration For Proteomics Data Resources And The Development Of The Application Platform

With the implementation of HGP (Human Genome Project, HGP), life science has entered the post-genomic era, hundreds of different types of databases have been developed according to the exponential growth of nucleic acid, protein sequence and structure data. These distributed, autonomous and heterogeneous databases resulted in great difficulties in sharing and integrating data for researchers. Therefore, studies of a universal integration approach for the distributed, heterogeneous data sources have great significance.Taking cooperative research in disease proteomics laboratories as application background, we made an in-depth study on the key technologies of sharing and integrating proteomics data resources, aiming at common problems of data integration. We proposed a method to solve the structural and semantic heterogeneity problem between various data sources by combining metadata and ontology, consequently, formed a virtual,logical consistent center database. Based on these ideas, we proposed a metadata based integration scheme for proteomics data resources, we also designed a data sharing and integration platform to implement this scheme.Based on the scheme, we first established a common metadata standard applied to the multi-datasource integration to have a consistent description of metadata coming from different data sources. Then we built a metadata-database in accordance with the standards to store metadata. At the same time, we have provided abundant procedures in order to support the metadata access, management and maintenance, and we also have wrapped these procedures in different granularities to make them easy-used. In the end, we explained how to solve the structural and semantic heterogeneity problem between various data sources by annotating metadata with ontology.We designed several kinds of query to satisfy different needs from different users, developed a prototype visual tool called MetaPro1.0 which enabled users to accomplish operations such as extracting and importing metadata, managing and maintaining metadata database, querying data via metadata or ontology, it is an important part of our platform.