Overview

The purpose of the GeneTegra system is to provide users with a single entry point for gathering knowledge though the integration of data sources and execution of user-constructed queries over these sources. GeneTegra is ideally suited for genetic research as it allows users to conveniently connect and query remote data sources such as the UCSC and Ensembl genome databases and link results to gene data in proprietary databases or local files. Data integration increases the depth of bioinformatics annotation and reduces the effort required to manually annotate data in individual data sources.

The main GeneTegra interface is composed of a menubar and toolbar at the top, the left concept panel that presents the concepts, attributes and relationships between concepts, and either the modeling environment shown above or the query environment. The concepts can originate from different and distributed databases or data sources which can be linked together though GeneTegra's semantic data integration engine without the need to import or move the data. The data can change, grow with the addition of more records, or shrink and as long as the model remains the same it will not affect the capacity to browse and query the data. If the model changes, through the addition or deletion of new concepts, attributes or relationships, the GeneTegra modeling environment makes it convenient to adjust the model to the new changes.