(Almost) Hands-Off Information Integration for the Life Sciences

Abstract

Data integration in complex domains, such as the life sciences, involves either manual data curation, offering highest information quality at highest price, or follows a schema integration and mapping approach, leading to moderate information quality at a moderate price. We suggest a radically different integration approach, called ALADIN, for the life sciences application domain. The predominant feature of the ALADIN system is an architecture that allows almost automatic integration of new data sources into the system, i.e., it offers data integration at almost no cost. We suggest a novel combination of data and text mining, schema matching, and duplicate detection to combat the reduction in information quality that seems inevitable when demanding a high degree of automatism. These heuristics can also lead to the detection of previously unknown or unseen relationships between objects, thus directly supporting the discovery-based work of life science researchers. We argue that such a system is a valuable contribution in two areas. First, it offers challenging and new problems for database research. Second, the ALADIN system would be a valuable knowledge resource for life science research.