Yanchao Wang

Date of Award

8-3-2007

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Rajshekhar Sunderraman - Chair

Second Advisor

Yanqing Zhang

Third Advisor

Xiaolin Hu

Fourth Advisor

Yichuan Zhao

Abstract

With advancement in the development of the new laboratory instruments and experimental techniques, the protein data has an explosive increasing rate. Therefore how to efficiently store, retrieve and modify protein data is becoming a challenging issue that most biological scientists have to face and solve. Traditional data models such as relational database lack of support for complex data types, which is a big issue for protein data application. Hence many scientists switch to the object-oriented databases since object-oriented nature of life science data perfectly matches the architecture of object-oriented databases, but there are still a lot of problems that need to be solved in order to apply OODB methodologies to manage protein data. One major problem is that the general-purpose OODBs do not have any built-in data types for biological research and built-in biological domain-specific functional operations. In this dissertation, we present an application system with built-in data types and built-in biological domain-specific functional operations that extends the Object-Oriented Database (OODB) system by adding domain-specific additional layers Protein-QL, Protein Algebra Architecture and Protein-OODB above OODB to manage protein structure data. This system is composed of three parts: 1) Client API to provide easy usage for different users. 2) Middleware including Protein-QL, Protein Algebra Architecture and Protein-OODB is designed to implement protein domain specific query language and optimize the complex queries, also it capsulates the details of the implementation such that users can easily understand and master Protein-QL. 3) Data Storage is used to store our protein data. This system is for protein domain, but it can be easily extended into other biological domains to build a bio-OODBMS. In this system, protein, primary, secondary, and tertiary structures are defined as internal data types to simplify the queries in Protein-QL such that the domain scientists can easily master the query language and formulate data requests, and EyeDB is used as the underlying OODB to communicate with Protein-OODB. In addition, protein data is usually stored as PDB format and PDB format is old, ambiguous, and inadequate, therefore, PDB data curation will be discussed in detail in the dissertation.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.57709/1059430

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