Title

Synchronization of APIIS based farm animal biodiversity systems

Authors

Zhivko Duchev^1,2* and Eildert Groeneveld²

Affiliation

¹Department of Animal Breeding and Genetics, University of Veterinary Medicine, 30559 Hannover, Germany, ²Institute for Animal Breeding, Federal Agricultural Research Center (FAL), 31535 Neustadt, Germany

E-mail*

duchev@tzv.fal.de; * Corresponding author

Article Type

Database

Date

received March 24, 2006; revised April 25, 2006; accepted April 30, 2006; published online May 03, 2006

Abstract

One of the major problems in the management of farm animal and biodiversity information is the exchange of data and keeping it up-to-date, an issue that is very common with distributed information systems consisting of number of databases. This article describes the synchronization protocol developed in APIIS (adaptable platform independent information system) framework and reviews the basic considerations required when building distributed information system that has to exchange information in a network of APIIS based systems. The protocol is designed to synchronize a common part of different database structures. It is developed without any intended use of proprietary database engine and can work with a variety of RDBMS (relational database management system). The main targets of the protocol are animal biodiversity information systems without permanently connected nodes. The EFABIS (European farm animal biodiversity information system) is reviewed as an example of the implementation.

Keywords

database management; data synchronization; farm animal information systems

Availability

The synchronization protocol is integrated as a part of the APIIS framework, which is freely available from the authors.

Glossary of Terms

Data element (DE) = smallest amount of data treated as one block in the synchronization process. DE is the list of columns from a defined subset of records in a table; Node = each independent part (database) of the global information network; Source = any node that distributes data elements to other nodes; Target = set of nodes to which one source distributes a data element; network manager = the management authority that will route the traffic of information, preventing conflicts or inconsistencies.

Citation

Duchev & Groeneveld, Bioinformation 1(5): 146-152 (2006)

Edited by

P. Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.