[GUSDEV] synonym table(s)

[Deborah P. <pi...@pc...>]

I would like to propose another table(s) to hold synonym information but 
I'm uncertain what to propose. Therefore, I would like to solicit opinions.

Immediate motivation:
Genetic markers often have aliases and, as in many cases, there could be 
more than one alias per marker. Storing multiple aliases as a string 
list in a single attribute of a view or table is clumsy and results in 
inefficient queries. The obvious solution is a separate table for 
aliases which I've called synonyms.

There are several possible tables that could be proposed:
1) The proposed view to hold Genetic Markers is a view of NAFeatureImp 
so we could have a NAFeatureSynonym table with hard links to NAFeature.
2) We could have a GeneticMarkerSynonym table dedicated to a 
GeneticMarker view, which would also have hard links to NAFeature.
3) We could have a Synonym table with linking tables  - e.g. 
SynonymNAFeature - and the linking table could have hard links to 
Synonym and NAFeature.

There are others but these capture the general idea. I am partial to the 
third as this Synonym table could be multi-purpose while the linking 
tables could have only hard links.

Let me add, there are synonym tables in GUS - 
AAGeneSyynonym,GeneSynonym,ProteinSynonym,MoietySynonym,GOSynonym - but 
none that can be used for nafeatures.

                                                                                                                                                                                      
Debbie