Using Prolog to Provide Access to Metadata in an Object-Oriented Database (original) (raw)

P/FDM is an object-oriented database implemented in Prolog that is intended to provide a platform for the development of data intensive applications (e.g. scientific databases). It is being used to store information about protein structures. A Prolog application has been developed that uses this large database to assist biochemists in homology modelling of proteins. Because of the large amounts of data involved, it is essential that database access be efficient. This is particularly true of metadata, which must be accessed several times to retrieve even a single value from the database. Unfortunately, this causes a conflict with user applications, which also need to access metadata. Now uniformity of access replaces efficiency as the main consideration. This paper examines this conflict of requirements and a solution is proposed. Finally, the suitability of Prolog for the implementation of such a solution is discussed.