H-InvDB

H-InvDB in 2013: An omics study platform for human functional gene and transcript discovery

Abstract: Online learning initia-tives over the past decade have become increasingly comprehen-sive in their selection of courses and sophisticated in their presen-tation, culminating in the recent announcement of a number of consortium and startup activities that promise to make a university education on the internet, free of charge, a real possibility. At this pivotal moment it is appropriate to explore the potential for obtaining comprehensive bioinformatics training with currently existing free video resources. This article pre-sents such a bioinformatics curric-ulum in the form of a virtual course catalog, together with editorial commentary, and an assessment of strengths, weaknesses, and likely future directions for open online learning in this field. Online Learning Comes of Age Online academic ‘‘courseware’ ’ at the university level has now been available to the public for a decade, the earliest concerted effort having originated in 2002 with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and their OpenCour-seWare initiative

Abstract Supporting database schema evolution repre-sents a long-standing challenge of practical and theoretical importance for modern information systems. In this paper, we describe techniques and systems for automating the critical tasks of migrating the database and rewriting the legacy applications. In addition to labor saving, the ben-efits delivered by these advances are many and include reliable prediction of outcome, minimization of downtime, system-produced documentation, and support for archiving, historical queries, and provenance. The PRISM/PRISM++ system delivers these benefits, by solving the difficult prob-lem of automating the migration of databases and the rewrit-ing of queries and updates. In this paper, we present the PRISM/PRISM++ system and the novel technology that made it possible. In particular, we focus on the difficult and previously unsolved problem of supporting legacy queries and updates under schema and integrity constraints evolution. The PRISM/PRISM++ approach consists in providing the users with a set of SQL-based Schema Modification Opera-tors (SMOs), which describe how the tables in the old schema are modified into those in the new schema. In order to sup-port updates, SMOs are extended with integrity constraints