title: BioMart: a data federation framework for large collaborative projects.
abstract: BioMart is a freely available, open source, federated database system that provides a unified access to disparate, geographically distributed data sources. It is designed to be data agnostic and platform independent, such that existing databases can easily be incorporated into the BioMart framework. BioMart allows databases hosted on different servers to be presented seamlessly to users, facilitating collaborative projects between different research groups. BioMart contains several levels of query optimization to efficiently manage large data sets and offers a diverse selection of graphical user interfaces and application programming interfaces to ensure that queries can be performed in whatever manner is most convenient for the user. The software has now been adopted by a large number of different biological databases spanning a wide range of data types and providing a rich source of annotation available to bioinformaticians and biologists alike.
authors.affiliation: Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Toronto, Informatics and Biocomputing, Ontario M5G 0A3, Canada.
authors.forename: Junjun
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Syed
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Haider
authors.forename: Joachim
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Baran
authors.forename: Anthony
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cros
authors.forename: Jonathan M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Guberman
authors.forename: Jack
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hsu
authors.forename: Yong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liang
authors.forename: Long
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Yao
authors.forename: Arek
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kasprzyk
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D003628:Database Management Systems; D016208:Databases, Factual; D007391:International Cooperation; D020407:Internet; D014584:User-Computer Interface