Editing Biological database (section)

==Problems and challenges==

Biological knowledge is distributed among countless databases. This sometimes makes it difficult to ensure the '''consistency''' of information, e.g. when different names are used for the same species or different data formats. As a consequence, '''inter-operability''' is a constant challenge for information exchange. For instance, if a DNA sequence database stores the DNA sequence along the name of a species, a name change of that species may break the links to other databases which may use a different name. [[Integrative bioinformatics]] is one field attempting to tackle this problem by providing unified access. One solution is how biological databases [[cross-reference]] to other databases with [[Accession number (bioinformatics)|accession numbers]] to link their related knowledge together (e.g. so that the accession number stays the same even if a species name changes). '''Redundancy''' is another problem, as many databases must store the same information, e.g. [[protein structure database]]s also contain the sequence of the proteins they cover, their sequence, and their bibliographic information.