The process of building a new database relevant to some field of study in biomedicine involves transforming, integrating, and cleansing multiple data sources, as well as adding new material and annotations. We review in this paper some of the requirements of a general solution to this data integration problem. We survey several representative technologies and approaches to data integration in biomedicine. Then we highlight some interesting features that separate the more general data integration technologies from the more specialized ones. 1 Requirements of a General Integration System for Biological Data The process of building a new database relevant to some field of study in biomedicine involves transforming, integrating, and cleansing multiple data sources, as well as adding new material and annotations. We review in Section 2 some representative technologies for data integration in biomedicine. Then we highlight in Section 3 some of the features that distinguish the more general ...
L. Wong