An extensible web interface for databases and its application to storing biochemical data

Nicos Angelopoulos, Paul Taylor

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

This paper presents a generic web-based database interface implemented in Prolog. We discuss the advantages of the implementa- tion platform and demonstrate the system's applicability in providing access to integrated biochemical data. Our system exploits two libraries of SWI-Prolog to create a schema-transparent interface within a rela- tional setting. As is expected in declarative programming, the interface was written with minimal programming effort due to the high level of the language and its suitability to the task. We highlight two of Prolog's features that are well suited to the task at hand: term representation of structured documents and relational nature of Prolog which facilitates transparent integration of relational databases. Although we developed the system for accessing in-house biochemical and genomic data the inter- face is generic and provides a number of extensible features. We describe some of these features with references to our research databases. Finally we outline an in-house library that facilitates interaction between Prolog and the R statistical package. We describe how it has been employed in the present context to store output from statistical analysis on to the database.

Original languageEnglish
Number of pages1
Publication statusPublished - 1 Dec 2010
Event26th International Conference on Logic Programming, ICLP 2010 - Joint Workshop on Implementation of Constraint Logic Programming Systems and Logic-based Methods in Programming Environments - CICLOPS-WLPE 2010 - Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
Duration: 15 Jul 201015 Jul 2010

Conference

Conference26th International Conference on Logic Programming, ICLP 2010 - Joint Workshop on Implementation of Constraint Logic Programming Systems and Logic-based Methods in Programming Environments - CICLOPS-WLPE 2010
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityEdinburgh, Scotland
Period15/07/1015/07/10

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • Biochem-ical data
  • Prolog programming
  • User interface
  • Web services

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