The data-warehouse disclosed in this application focuses on providing both structure and algorithms suitable for statistical analysis of a microarray database's entire contents including the experiment annotations. It addresses the rapid growth of the amount of hybridisation data obtained from microarrays, more detailed experimental descriptions, and new kinds of experiments in the future. A storage concept is disclosed and in one embodiment it is applied to an organism-specific database. Although the databases may contain different ontologies of experiment annotations, they share the same structure and therefore can be accessed by the very same statistical algorithms. Experiment ontologies have not yet reached their final shape, and standards are reduced to minimal conventions that do, not yet warrant extensive description. An ontology-independent structure enables updates of annotation hierarchies during normal database operation without altering the structure.
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