TAIR DATA REPRESENTATION AND DATABASE DESIGN

¹ National Center for Genome Resources, 2935 Rodeo Park Drive East, Santa Fe, NM 87505, USA

The core element of The Arabidopsis Information Resource is the relational database system containing all of the data elements that TAIR makes available via its web interface. We've developed a complex, comprehensive database currently built around 165 tables, including major data types like maps, contigs, clones, loci, gene models, genetic markers, polymorphisms, sequences, germplasms, publications, organizations, people, and microarray data. These and other data types are interconnected through a vast network of relationships that is simplified through a hierarchical design. In this workshop I will illustrate the database schema (http://www.arabidopsis.org/search/ERwin/Tair.htm), discuss some of the lessons we learned in relation to the object-oriented software design that we incorporated in TAIR, and describe some performance enhancement tricks that we have employed.