Developing and accessing scientific databases with the OPM data management tools

Summary form only given. The Object-Protocol Model (OPM) data management tools provide facilities for rapid development, documentation, and flexible exploration of scientific databases. The tools are based on OPM, an object-oriented data model which is similar to the ODMG standard, but also supports extensions for modeling scientific data. Databases designed using OPM can be implemented using a variety of commercial relational DBMSs, using schema translation tools that generate complete DBMS database definitions from OPM schemas. Further, OPM schemas can be retrofitted on top of existing databases defined using a variety of notations, such as the relational data model or the ASN.1 data exchange format, using OPM retrofitting tools. Several archival molecular biology databases have been designed and implemented using the OPM tools, including the Genome Database (GDB) and the Protein Data Bank (PDB), while other scientific databases, such as the Genome Sequence Database (GSDB), have been retrofitted with semantically enhanced views using the OPM tools