DATABASE CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS IN NEUROSCIENTIFIC APPLICATIONS

In the scientific community, the quality and progress of various endea vors depend in part on the ability of researchers to share and exchang e large quantities of heterogeneous data with one another efficiently. This requires controlled sharing and exchange of information among au tonomous, 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 allo w neuroscientists to manage and exchange data. Requirements for the Ne uART application, in combination with an underlying network-aware data base, are described at a conceptual level. Emphasis is placed on funct ionality from the user's perspective and on requirements that the data base must fulfill. The most important functionality required by neuros cientists is the ability to construct brain models using information f rom different repositories. To accomplish such a task, users need to b rowse remote and local sources and summaries of data and capture relev ant information to be used in building and extending the brain models. Other functionalities are also required, including posing queries rel ated to brain models, augmenting and customizing brain models, and sha ring brain models in a collaborative environment, An extensible object -oriented data model is presented to capture the many data types expec ted in this application. After presenting conceptual level design issu es, we describe several known database solutions that support these re quirements and discuss requirements that demand further research. Data integration for heterogeneous databases is discussed in terms of redu cing 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. Fina lly, two existing systems are evaluated and compared using the identif ied requirements. (C) 1997 Academic Press.