SLAD – An Integrated Swine MHC Database: A Case Study of Data Warehousing in Molecular Immunology

“Outcomes Research” in molecular immunology is driven by faster, cheaper and increasingly sophisticated methods such as miniaturisation, automation, and data integration. The latter is a prerequisite for efficient information analysis, knowledge discovery, and eventually research planning. The data warehousing approach has been successfully applied for managing clinical data [1], but rarely in exploratory biological research. In order to clarify aspects of data warehousing in molecular immunology we constructed a small model database of swine major histocompatibility antigens (swine MHC or SLA) using warehousing principles.