Ontology-driven mapping of temporal data in biomedical databases

Biomedical databases contain considerable amounts of time-oriented data, which are not typically in a format suitable for querying complex temporal patterns. We address this problem in implementing Synchronus, a tool for ontology-driven mapping of data from an existing relational database to a database schema with a uniform temporal representation. We discuss the design of Synchronus, which consists of a schema-mapping ontology and a data-mapping algorithm that together provide general capabilities for database transformation.