Model Merging

An InterMine model describes the classes available to the InterMine system and their relationships. The model is used to generate the database tables, the Java class files and the web application.

A model can be described using a model file. The model can be either read from one file or built up from several files using “model merging”. An example of a single file model is used in the testmodel project.

Configuration

An InterMine datamine is built from sources. Each source can contribute to the data model and also provides data. When a mine is built with the ant build-db command, the model is created from small “additions” file contributed by each source. Specifically, the model is created by reading the project.xml file and merging the model fragment from each addition file for each source. As an example the additions file for uniprot is bio/sources/uniprot/uniprot_additions.xml

Other additions files (ie. not from sources) can be explicitly merged by setting the extra.model.paths.start and extra.model.paths.end properties in the project.properties of your dbmodel directory. An example from FlyMine is:

extra.model.paths.start = bio/core/genomic_additions.xml bio/sources/so/so_additions.xml
extra.model.paths.end = bio/core/shortcuts.xml

Here genomic_additions.xml and so_additions.xml will be merged first and shortcuts.xml will be merged after all other model fragments.

Note that the bio/core/core.xml model fragment is always used as a base for the merging - everything will be merge into the classes in core.xml

Example

From core.xml:

...
<class name="Protein" extends="BioEntity" is-interface="true">
  <attribute name="name" type="java.lang.String"/>
  <attribute name="primaryAccession" type="java.lang.String"/>
  <attribute name="length" type="java.lang.Integer"/>
  <attribute name="molecularWeight" type="java.lang.Integer"/>
  <reference name="sequence" referenced-type="Sequence"/>
  <collection name="genes" referenced-type="Gene" ordered="true" reverse-reference="proteins"/>
</class>
...

From the uniprot source (uniprot_additions.xml):

...
<class name="Protein" is-interface="true">
  <attribute name="description" type="java.lang.String"/>
  <attribute name="ecNumber" type="java.lang.String"/>
  <collection name="publications" referenced-type="Publication"/>
</class>
...

Final, merged, model definition:

...
<class name="Protein" extends="BioEntity" is-interface="true">
  <attribute name="description" type="java.lang.String"/>
  <attribute name="ecNumber" type="java.lang.String"/>
  <attribute name="name" type="java.lang.String"/>
  <attribute name="primaryAccession" type="java.lang.String"/>
  <attribute name="length" type="java.lang.Integer"/>
  <attribute name="molecularWeight" type="java.lang.Integer"/>
  <reference name="sequence" referenced-type="Sequence"/>
  <collection name="publications" referenced-type="Publication"/>
  <collection name="genes" referenced-type="Gene" ordered="true" reverse-reference="proteins"/>
</class>
...

The resulting class has all attributes of the Protein from core.xml and from uniprot_additions.xml. Note that in uniprot we don’t need to declare a base class for Protein (like as extends=”BioEntity”) as the base class from core.xml is merged into the final class.