A virtual approach to integrating biomedical databases and terminologies

INFOGENMED is an informatics and telematics project, funded by the IST directorate of the European Commission. In this paper, we present our current achievements and plans to develop a series of tools to provide on-line integration of remote medical and genetic databases through a common, Web-based browser. Users at research and professional settings will soon need guided access to a wide range of medical (e.g, clinical databases, medical records) and biological (e.g., genomic and proteomic databases) sources. Most of this information is currently located at different heterogeneous databases and data warehouses, including diverse schemas, vocabularies, query languages and restricted access. We have chosen a virtual repository approach for the project. We briefly describe an unification approach to integrate the contents of the databases. By using this kind of projects, users can access different remote sources and retrieve the information they are looking for. Once this information is available, different data analysis methods (such as data mining techniques) can be used in order to extract patterns and knowledge