Fellenberg Kurt, Hauser Nicole C, Brors Benedikt, Hoheisel Jörg D, Vingron Martin
Department of Theoretical Bioinformatics, German Cancer Research Center, PO Box 101949, D-69009 Heidelberg, Germany.
Bioinformatics. 2002 Mar;18(3):423-33. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/18.3.423.
Microarray technology provides access to expression levels of thousands of genes at once, producing large amounts of data. These datasets are valuable only if they are annotated by sufficiently detailed experiment descriptions. However, in many databases a substantial number of these annotations is in free-text format and not readily accessible to computer-aided analysis.
The Multi-Conditional Hybridization Intensity Processing System (M-CHIPS), a data warehousing concept, focuses on providing both structure and algorithms suitable for statistical analysis of a microarray database's entire contents including the experiment annotations. It addresses the rapid growth of the amount of hybridization data, more detailed experimental descriptions, and new kinds of experiments in the future. We have developed a storage concept, a particular instance of which is an organism-specific database. Although these databases may contain different ontologies of experiment annotations, they share the same structure and therefore can be accessed by the very same statistical algorithms. Experiment ontologies have not yet reached their final shape, and standards are reduced to minimal conventions that do not yet warrant extensive description. An ontology-independent structure enables updates of annotation hierarchies during normal database operation without altering the structure.
微阵列技术可一次性获取数千个基因的表达水平，产生大量数据。只有当这些数据集通过足够详细的实验描述进行注释时，它们才具有价值。然而，在许多数据库中，大量此类注释是自由文本格式，计算机辅助分析难以直接获取。
多条件杂交强度处理系统（M-CHIPS）是一种数据仓库概念，专注于提供适合对微阵列数据库全部内容（包括实验注释）进行统计分析的结构和算法。它应对杂交数据量的快速增长、更详细的实验描述以及未来新类型的实验。我们开发了一种存储概念，其一个特定实例是特定生物体数据库。尽管这些数据库可能包含不同的实验注释本体，但它们具有相同的结构，因此可以通过完全相同的统计算法进行访问。实验本体尚未最终成型，标准简化为尚未需要详细描述的最小约定。独立于本体的结构允许在正常数据库操作期间更新注释层次结构而不改变结构。
