Download BioSeD - Biological Sequences Database

Figure 4.3: Taxonomies in the relational model
4.2.3
Sequence, labels and label instances
The relational design to store sequences and sequence’s annotations is one of the most crucial
and important aspect of the whole system, as it will greatly affect the search performance
and how the sequence annotation will work at the storage level.
First, we designed a Sequence table (Table B.10 on page 97) which stores all system
sequences. This table contains the value of the sequence’s properties: name and content. From
the user perspective these two sequence properties work as any other label, although they
will skip the whole storage mechanism described below and be stored right at the Sequence
table.
Figure 4.4: Label, sequences and label instances.
To store label information which can be used to instantiate label instances resulting in
sequence annotations, we created the Label table (Table B.9 on page 96). For each Label row
we store all the label properties (see Section 3.2), type, metadata and code used to be run
at specific times in the system: automatic annotations, sequence modifications, label values
validation, etc.
With these two tables in place, we created another table, LabelSequence (Table B.11 on
page 97), which stores label instances, connecting a sequence with a label.
20