DESIGN, IMPLEMENTATION, AND MAINTENANCE OF A MODEL ORGANISM DATABASE FOR Arabidopsis thaliana

¹ Carnegie Institution, Department of Plant Biology, 260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305

² The National Center for Genome Resources, 2935 Rodeo Park Drive East, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505

The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) is a publicly accessible web-based community database for the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. TAIR provides an integrated view of genes, sequences, proteins, germplasms, clones, metabolic pathways, microarray expression, ecotypes, polymorphisms, publications, maps and community information. TAIR is developed and maintained by a collaboration between the National Center for Genome Resources and Carnegie Institution's Department of Plant Biology. It is also a tight collaboration between software developers and biologists. Biologists provide specification and use cases for the system, acquire, analyze and curate data, interact with users, and test the software. Software developers design, implement, and test the database and software. We are also closely allied with other groups including an Arabidopsis stock center (Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center at Ohio State University), The Institute for Genome Research, Gene Ontology Consortium, Plant Ontology Consortium, and MetaCyc at SRI. The collaborations include communal curation of shared data objects such as controlled vocabularies, metabolic pathways, biological materials and collaboration of software development. In this workshop, I will describe what it takes to build and maintain the TAIR system. Subsequent presentations will describe the process of database design, software architecture and maintenance,data acquisition, and curation and interactions with our user community.