IBM Systems Journal - 2002 Copyright

IBM Skip to main content
  Home     Products & services     Support & downloads     My account  

  Select a country  
Journals Home  
  Systems Journal  
  ·  Current Issue  
  ·  Recent Issues  
  ·  Papers in Progress  
  ·  Search/Index  
  ·  Orders  
  ·  Description  
  ·  Author's Guide  
Journal of Research
and Development
  Staff  
  Contact Us  
  Related links:  
     IBM Research  

IBM Journal of Research and Development  
Volume 40, Number 2, Page 489 (2001)
Deep computing for the life sciences
  Full article: arrowHTML arrowPDF arrowASCII   arrowCopyright info





   

DiscoveryLink: A system for integrated access to life sciences data sources

by L. M. Haas, P. M. Schwarz, P. Kodali, E. Kotlar, J. E. Rice, W. C. Swope
Vast amounts of life sciences data reside today in specialized data sources, with specialized query processing capabilities. Data from one source often must be combined with data from other sources to give users the information they desire. There are database middleware systems that extract data from multiple sources in response to a single query. IBM's DiscoveryLink is one such system, targeted to applications from the life sciences industry. DiscoveryLink provides users with a virtual database to which they can pose arbitrarily complex queries, even though the actual data needed to answer the query may originate from several different sources, and none of those sources, by itself, is capable of answering the query. We describe the DiscoveryLink offering, focusing on two key elements, the wrapper architecture and the query optimizer, and illustrate how it can be used to integrate the access to life sciences data from heterogeneous data sources.
Related Subjects: