Title: Curated Databases
Speaker: Peter Buneman
         University of Edinburgh

Abstract

Scientists, notably biologists, are making increasing use of databases
to publish both their data and their interpretation of data.  These
databases are valuable because of the human effort (curation) that
goes into their construction and maintenance.  They typically consist
of a mixture of source data, metadata, annotations, and relevant data
that has been extracted from other curated databases.

Current database and data exchange technology does not serve database
curation well.  In this talk I shall address a number of issues
connected with curated databases.

Annotation of existing data now provides a new form of communication
between scientists, but conventional database technology provides
little support for attaching annotations. I shall show why new models
of both data and query languages are needed.

Closely related to annotation is provenance -- knowing where your data
has come from.  This is now a real problem in bioinformatics with
literally hundreds of curated databases, most of which contain
substantial amounts of data extracted from other curated databases.

Preserving past states of a database -- archiving -- is also important
for verifying the basis of scientific research, yet few published
scientific databases do a good job of archiving.  Past "editions" of
the database get lost. I shall describe a system that allows frequent
archiving and efficient retrieval with remarkably little space 
overhead.

Finally I shall argue that we need a new model of how curated
databases are constructed.  The idea that such databases are
constructed as views of other data through conventional query and
update languages is unhelpful, and that formulation of a
"copy-and-paste" model of data construction may provide us with better
curation tools.

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