ARMEDA II: Supporting Genomic Medicine through the Integration of Medical and Genetic Databases

• Venue: BIBE '04 Proceedings of the 4th IEEE Symposium on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering
• Year: 2004

In this paper we present ARMEDA II, a projectdesigned to integrate distributed heterogeneousmedical and genetic databases in support of genomicmedicine. In this project, we have followed a "virtualrepository" or VR approach. Although VRs areentities that do not contain any data, but metadata,they give users the perception of being working withlocal repositories that integrate data from differentand remote sources. Our approach is based on twobasic operators employed to connect new databasesto the system: mapping and unification. The mappingprocess produces what is called the "virtualconceptual schema" of the newly created VR whilethe unification process provides tools to create anintegrated virtual schema for at least two pre-existingVRs. We tested the current implementation ofARMEDA II using two tumor databases, onecontaining information from a hospital and the othercontaining genetic data associated to the tumorsamples. The performance of the system was alsoevaluated using a pre-created set of 30 queries. Forall queries the test yielded promising results since thesystem successfully retrieved the correct information.The ARMEDA II project is the current version of anongoing project developed in the framework of anEuropean Commission funded project.