An Evaluation of Multiple Approaches for Federating Biological Data

Between technological breakthroughs and new computational approaches, the quantity of biological data is increasing explosively. As of 2007, there were 1078 biological databases. Providing biologists with central and uniform access to all types of data stored in biological databases is becoming critical. To minimize disruption of current operations, maintain local autonomy and handle heterogeneities, federated databases and Web services have been proposed as viable solutions. This paper explores these issues and reports on our experience with testing multiple approaches for biological database integration. It discusses the trade-offs among performance, support for heterogeneity, robustness and scalability. A significant result of our study is that the most flexible approach, Web Services, performs very competitively.