title: Light-weight integration of molecular biological databases.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Due to the increasing number of molecular biological databases and the exponential growth of their contents, database integration is an important topic of research in bioinformatics. Existing approaches in this area have in common that considerable efforts are needed to provide integrated access to heterogeneous data sources.
  
  
  RESULTS
  This article describes the LIMBO architecture as a light-weight approach to molecular biological database integration. By building systems upon this architecture, the efforts needed for database integration can be significantly lowered.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  As an illustration of the principle usefulness of the underlying ideas, a prototypical implementation based upon the LIMBO architecture is described. This implementation is exclusively based on freely available open source components like the PostgreSQL database management system and the BioRuby project. Additional files and modified components are available upon request from the author.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of Koblenz, P.O. Box 201 106, 56016 Koblenz, Germany. philippi@uni-koblenz.de
authors.forename: Stephan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Philippi
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards; D003628:Database Management Systems / Q000592:standards*; D016208:Databases, Factual / Q000592:standards*; D019146:Hypermedia; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards*; D010865:Pilot Projects; D012984:Software; D018511:Systems Integration; D014584:User-Computer Interface