Database Challenges in the Integration of Biomedical Data Sets

The clinical and basic science research domains present exciting and difficult data integration issues. Solving these problems is crucial as current research efforts in the field of biomedicine heavily depend upon integrated storage, querying, analysis, and visualization of clinicopathology information, genomic annotation, and large scale functional genomic research data sets. Such large scale experimental analyses are essential to decipher the pathophysiological processes occurring in most human diseases so that they may be effectively treated. In this paper, we discuss the challenges of integration of multiple biomedical data sets not only at the university level but also at the national level and present the data warehousing based solution we have employed at Washington University School of Medicine. We also describe the tools we have developed to store, query, analyze, and visualize these data sets together