Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills

Chapter 13. Building Biological Databases

Since the advent of the World Wide Web, biological databases have become a vital part of the biological literature. Knowing how to find information in and download information from the central biological data repositories is as important a skill for researchers now as traditional literature searching. Major online data resources, such as the Protein Data Bank and GenBank, are expertly designed to provide information to users who have no understanding of how the underlying databases function, and to allow the deposition of data to a central repository by people who wouldn't know how to, or want to, build their own private databases.

However, as web databases become more integral to sharing information within the scientific community, it is likely that more people will want to develop their own databases and allow their colleagues to access their data directly. Even something as simple as a web site for a research group can be improved greatly and made easier to maintain with databases. In this chapter, we introduce some elementary database terminology and give an example of how to set up a database for a simple data set.

If you're relatively new to the world of computers and software, you're not going to be able to read this chapter and proceed directly to setting up your own database. What we hope to give you is an idea of the steps involved in developing a database: designing a data model, choosing a database management system (DBMS), ...