7. Glossary – Definitions

Integration; Integration

Unified access to distributed (geographically distributed) and heterogeneous data.

Instance; Instance

Data. Object. In the context of relational databases, a data instance in a table is a row in that table.

Megabase; megabase

Unit of measurement for assessing the size of a genome, in thousands of nucleotides.

Ontology; Ontologie

An ontology is a conceptualization of a domain of study. It specifies this domain, i.e. it describes it formally. In concrete terms, an ontology is a set of terms (words) and relations between these terms. The language used to formalize the ontology (and the set of axioms associated with it) is used by an inference engine to discover new knowledge (logical inference)....