9223350 Karp Molecular biology databases will be of greater utility to biomedical researchers when interconnected than in their current isolated state. The primary impact of the meeting will be to stimulate interdisciplinary research projects between computer scientists who work in the area of integrating heterogeneous databases, and bioinformatics researchers who develop and use molecular biology databases. Computer scientists at the workshop are learning about the properties of existing databases and the requirements that bioinformatics researchers will have for interconnection. Bioinformatics researchers at the workshop are being exposed to strategies and technologies for interconnection that have been developed by computer science researchers. A second focus of the workshop is to conduct an experiment toward the development of a global, multi-database schema for several existing molecular biology databases. A global schema is a first step toward interconnecting these databases, and is a valuable exercise for learning about and evaluating existing tools for the management of database schemas. A final report will summarize the results of the workshop presentations and multidatabase schema experiment, and will be distributed to members of the database and bioinformatics communities. ***
