Implementing an integrated system for heterogeneous molecular biology databases with intelligent agents

We propose a method for integrating heterogeneous molecular biology databases. Since molecular biology data are distributed among multiple repositories that represent different biological domains, it is useful to integrate data along with the correlations of the domains. In our method, the integration is dynamically carried out by two types of agents; database agent and user agent, which reside at a data repository and a user, respectively. By limiting the search space with keywords specified by users, the cost of integration can be reduced considerably. The performance of a prototype system was evaluated by measuring the execution time for integration of GenBank (a DNA nucleotide database), SWISS-PROT, PIR (protein amino-acid sequence databases) and PDB (a protein 3D structure database) with a sample query.