News/Chado in RDF: OpenFlyData
The OpenFlyData project has ported the FlyBase Chado database and several other Drosophila gene expression databases to the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Each source database has a separate RDF store, and OpenFlyData provides both a browser and a programmatic SPARQL-based interface to each. Source databases include the Chado database from FlyBase, BDGP, FlyAtlas and FlyTED.
Transforming databases into RDF can be an effective way to merge these data, and does not require mapping everything to a central relational schema. The common graph-based data model facilitates the reuse of RDF data published by other projects, with fewer constraints on the kind of questions you can ask.
For more on OpenFlyData, see the Linked Data for GMOD Databases presentation from the August 2009 GMOD Meeting, and the OpenFlyData web site.
