Cabinet-Chemical and Biological Informatics Network

Vera Povolna, Scott Dixon, and David Weininger 

Physical integration is mainly a matter of technical or practical import. It may be necessary to make local copies of some data sources in order to ensure reliability or to reduce access times. For example, in the WWW (World Wide Web), Internet service providers often use local caches of popular web sites to improve access time. Because of the way certain servers operate, it may be necessary to have local copies of all data. 

The far more important dimension of integration is the degree of logical integration. Some current integration efforts along this dimension will be described. 

The most familiar highly distributed federation of information resources is the World Wide Web. It is possible to search the Web for text and a few other types of information with search engines like Google. However, since there is no structure to the information 

In the bioinformatics realm, SRS (Sequence Retrieval System) [2] is a popular system, which uses a centralized collection of data resources primarily in flat text file form and, more recently, handles XML (Extensible Markup Language) files as well. Data resources are treated in a federated manner since each is maintained in its original form. However, SRS contains a large number of cross-references between corresponding fields in various data sources, so that keyword searches can be done across them. SRS thus performs more structured searches across the information than what a simple text search provides (such as web indexes perform, for example). Even though the data model implicit in the cross-reference tables is not very deep, SRS provides a useful way for users to browse and do simple queries across a large number of data sources as well as to integrate results from some computational methods. 

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Informatics NETwork) [61, 62] as a server. CABINET [62], a federation of high-performance scientific databases that collaborate through web-like interfaces to provide integrated access to diverse chemical and biological information, is described elsewhere [61]. 

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