Complexities of Managing Biomedical Information

THE PROBLEMS WE FACE with representing and manipulating biological knowledge are not unique to biology, but biology is particularly difficult because it has a confluence of many technical challenges that often appear isolated in other domains. One key point is that we are rarely talking about something being impossible in a relational model, but instead are often referring to the relative difficulty (relative to ad hoc solutions, object oriented solutions, text-based solutions, and others). The key features of biological data that make them difficult to represent and manipulate efficiently include the following.