StorageBIT - A Metadata-aware, Extensible, Semantic and Hierarchical Database for Biosignals

Abstract

Acquisition of biomedical data is, nowadays, widespread, originating a deluge of data that may contain relevant and interesting information for health-care professionals, biosignal researchers, and the individuals themselves. This creates the need to organize the information in a structured way, facilitating collaboration and research efforts. Therefore, for that purpose, this paper investigates database systems and file formats, discussing current technologies, requirements and possible implementations. These implementations were put through a benchmarking package to analyze their insertion, query and update performance. A final approach combining the use of HDF5, a hierarchical file format for numerical data, and MongoDB, a NoSQL database, is proposed, as it showed the best combination of properties from the tested solutions.