Overview of the structures of heterogeneous genome databases

The data generated from the 15-year U.S. Human Genome Project is currently stored in different kinds of databases worldwide. Since there is no single standard for implementing and accessing genome databases, it is difficult for users to locate the relevant genome data among those databases. Researchers have been working on projects to integrate and to provide centralized access to these databases. Understanding the internal structures of the major types of genome databases is important to these projects. Thus, this paper provides an overview of the structures of different types of genome databases, including sequence, map, model organism, bibliographic, and databases of databases. This paper describes how the genome data is presented to users, the entity-relationship (ER) schema diagrams, the relational tables, and the access and query methods.<>