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Achieving Evolvable Web-Database Bioscience Applications Using the EAV/CR Framework: Recent Advances

Affiliations of the authors: Center for Medical Informatics, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut (LM, NT, CC, PLM, PMN); Department of Neurobiology, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut (GS).

Correspondence and reprints: Prakash Nadkarni, MD, Center for Medical Informatics, Yale University School of Medicine, PO Box 208009, New Haven, CT 06520-8009; e-mail: <prakash.nadkarni{at}yale.edu>.

Received for publication: 12/03/02; accepted for publication: 05/04/03.

The EAV/CR framework, designed for database support of rapidly evolving scientific domains, utilizes metadata to facilitate schema maintenance and automatic generation of Web-enabled browsing interfaces to the data. EAV/CR is used in SenseLab, a neuroscience database that is part of the national Human Brain Project. This report describes various enhancements to the framework. These include (1) the ability to create "portals" that present different subsets of the schema to users with a particular research focus, (2) a generic XML-based protocol to assist data extraction and population of the database by external agents, (3) a limited form of ad hoc data query, and (4) semantic descriptors for interclass relationships and links to controlled vocabularies such as the UMLS.