The objective of this project is the development of an object oriented database system for supporting application programs used by scientists involved in the rational design of therapeutic agents and studies of specific interactions in peptides and proteins. This work is focused specifically on the data storage and access requirements this class of applications, and is the outgrowth of one component of a project much larger in scope entitled "Macromolecular Workbench: Computer-Assisted Analysis of Protein Design and Function" supported by DARPA. Specific work includes refinement of the data communications protocol used between the Macromolecular Workbench (MMWB) data manager module and object file access library, as well as reimplementation of the data manager in the C++ programming language in order to take advantage of the natural correspondence between scientific data and actions performed on this data as specified in the original MMWB data manager design. The design provides for a unified user interface and machine independent object oriented data access. The result of this project will have significant impact on other scientific applications software, and therefore on the scientific community as a whole, as this software will now be able to take advantage of a unified database system, thereby making possible a "toolkit" of scientific software with each tool capable of simultaneously directly manipulating common shared data.
