John,
In article <4.1.19991012181458.00bbde90 at imap4.lbl.gov>, JLMcCarthy at LBL.GOV
(John McCarthy) wrote:
> I think acedb would in fact be a good match for your data.
> You would need to make your own model(s), but then could use the
> query and table facilities to do most of what you describe, I think.
> You might also be able to create output that you could subsequently
> transform for further analysis in SAS, S, Excel, etc.
> You could do the transforms with Perl, AWK, or something else if necessary.
> Before too long you may be able to get the output as XML,
> at which point you could use XSL-T (transformation) to do transforms.
Thanks for the vote of confidence. Do you think that ACEDB will be able
to handle the specific problem of storing variable-length lists of actions
whose names are several characters long? I noticed that gene sequences
are stored as lists of single-character codes. What about the types of
queries we need? Here's a refresher on the queries:
> >They want to do queries which count things like the number of cycles with
> >a NEG1 (a negative response in a particular place in the flowchart) in
> >which the baby was fed. Generically, they want to queries like "count
> >where <action> appears before <action>", where "before" means anywhere in
> >the cycle and not just immediately before.
Thanks again,
Dave
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