ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVES: Nowadays, as the amounts of biological data are rapidly increasing, bioinformatics has become one of the important research issues. The bioinformatics data sources are, however, distributed and heterogeneous, and therefore, often poorly integrated and difficult to use together. As many bioinformatics analyses need to make use of multiple information sources, the problem of integration of bioinformatics data sources has become an important one. The purpose of this paper is to present an integration system for bioinformatics data sources. METHODS: To solve this problem, we present an integration system for bioinformatics data sources using a global MDR, which provides users with efficiency and convenience as if they use one system. We deal with the extraction of data elements for bioinformatics MDRs by using ISO 11179 mandatory attributes. RESULTS: A global bioinformatics MDR schema for given MDRs and the results of query processing are presented. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed system and concepts in this paper may be a good solution for the integration of diverse bioinformatics data sources.