Dashti A E, Ghandeharizadeh S, Stone J, Swanson L W, Thompson R H
Department of Biological Science, USC Brain Project, University of Southern California, Los Angeles 90089-2520, USA.
Neuroimage. 1997 Feb;5(2):97-115. doi: 10.1006/nimg.1996.0253.
In the scientific community, the quality and progress of various endeavors depend in part on the ability of researchers to share and exchange large quantities of heterogeneous data with one another efficiently. This requires controlled sharing and exchange of information among autonomous, distributed, and heterogeneous databases. In this paper, we focus on a neuroscience application, Neuroanatomical Rat Brain Viewer (NeuART Viewer) to demonstrate alternative database concepts that allow neuroscientists to manage and exchange data. Requirements for the NeuART application, in combination with an underlying network-aware database, are described at a conceptual level. Emphasis is placed on functionality from the user's perspective and on requirements that the database must fulfill. The most important functionality required by neuroscientists is the ability to construct brain models using information from different repositories. To accomplish such a task, users need to browse remote and local sources and summaries of data and capture relevant information to be used in building and extending the brain models. Other functionalities are also required, including posing queries related to brain models, augmenting and customizing brain models, and sharing brain models in a collaborative environment. An extensible object-oriented data model is presented to capture the many data types expected in this application. After presenting conceptual level design issues, we describe several known database solutions that support these requirements and discuss requirements that demand further research. Data integration for heterogeneous databases is discussed in terms of reducing or eliminating semantic heterogeneity when translations are made from one system to another. Performance enhancement mechanisms such as materialized views and spatial indexing for three-dimensional objects are explained and evaluated in the context of browsing, incorporating, and sharing. Policies for providing the system with fault tolerance and avoiding possible intellectual property abuses are presented. Finally, two existing systems are evaluated and compared using the identified requirements.
在科学界，各项工作的质量和进展部分取决于研究人员彼此高效共享和交换大量异构数据的能力。这需要在自主、分布式和异构数据库之间进行信息的受控共享和交换。在本文中，我们聚焦于一个神经科学应用——神经解剖大鼠脑浏览器（NeuART浏览器），以展示能让神经科学家管理和交换数据的替代数据库概念。在概念层面描述了NeuART应用的需求以及底层的网络感知数据库。重点在于从用户角度出发的功能以及数据库必须满足的需求。神经科学家所需的最重要功能是利用来自不同存储库的信息构建脑模型的能力。为完成这样一项任务，用户需要浏览远程和本地数据源及数据摘要，并获取用于构建和扩展脑模型的相关信息。还需要其他功能，包括提出与脑模型相关的查询、扩充和定制脑模型，以及在协作环境中共享脑模型。提出了一个可扩展的面向对象数据模型来捕获此应用中预期的多种数据类型。在介绍了概念层面的设计问题之后，我们描述了几种支持这些需求的已知数据库解决方案，并讨论了需要进一步研究的需求。从一个系统到另一个系统进行转换时，在减少或消除语义异构方面讨论了异构数据库的数据集成。在浏览、合并和共享的背景下解释并评估了诸如物化视图和三维对象的空间索引等性能增强机制。提出了为系统提供容错能力并避免可能的知识产权滥用的策略。最后，使用确定的需求对两个现有系统进行了评估和比较。
