The International Rice Information System (IRIS; www.iris.irri.org) is the rice implementation of ICIS. In additional to addressing traditional plant breeding, IRIS is being extended to handle the burgeoning quantity and diversity of rice structural and functional genomics data, including genetic mapping, genome sequence annotation, mutant, DNA microarray, proteomic and germplasm genotyping information. Specialist stand-alone programs and an integrated WWW portal are under continuing development to facilitate integrated, but often specialized views to all these new sources of information, tightly linked to traditional breeding data.

Extensive cross-linkages with other specialist databases such as GIS, public plant genome databases and genetic resources information systems like System-wide Information Network for Genetic Resources (SINGER; www.singer.cgiar.org) are being embedded within the database, using state-of-art database interoperability protocols like MOBY (www.biomoby.org); and biological controlled vocabularies and ontologies (e.g. www.geneontology.org).

The IRIS/ICIS project is an open source community involving public and private sector developers both inside and outside the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). To facilitate project-level sharing of ideas and resources, the project is also now hosted on the bioinformatics.org site, where interested scientists can participate in email list services and access programmatic resources.

IRIS/ICIS is an invaluable resource for all researchers, working on all aspects of rice biology, who might conceivably benefit from access to the latest international information linked unambiguously to specific germplasm. In general, the ICIS platform facilitates the global exchange of genetic resources and the deployment of new, knowledge-intensive, crop improvement systems that link information to the seeds being exchanged.

See also separately submitted poster for details.