AN OBJECT-ORIENTED QUERY SYSTEM TO MULTIPLE CROP DATABASES

¹ Missouri Maize Project, University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia, Missouri 65211, USA

² Rice Genome Research Project, NIAR/STAFF-Institute, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

³ Gene Logic, Inc., Berkeley, California, USA

The Missouri Maize Project (MMP) and the Rice Genome Research Program (RGP) are jointly developing a web-based object-oriented query system to access multiple crop databases. A major maize database, MaizeDB, has been implemented in Sybase DBMS . In addition to the MaizeDB, we are building a multidatabase query system for maize and rice genomes in collaboration with the Japanese RGP . The two relational databases can be concurrently queried using the OPM (Object-Protocol Model) tools of Gene Logic, Inc. The OPM tools are unique in a joint framework of object oriented and relational data models. They provide translations from various relational schemata to the OPM schema. The uniform OPM interface enables users to explore semantics and to assemble biological information from the two databases. This multidatabase query system will be useful to comparative genomic, functional genomics, and genetic/physical mappings of crops. Its implementation will facilitate the implementation of other applications under the OPM framework, such as comparative mapping software tools.