Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference

January 15-19, 2005
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Integration And Access Of Genetic Map And Plant Genetic Make-Up Data Through A Datawarehouse And Internet Portal

Raymond van Daelen¹ , Ruud Koomen¹ , Kornelis Stol¹ , Martin Reijans¹ , George Varga¹ , Frits Kelling² , Dwight Loyee² , Ronald Damhof² , Mark J.J. van Haaren¹ , Harold Verstegen¹

¹  Keygene N.V., Agro Business Park 90, P.O. Box 216, 6700 AE Wageningen, The Netherlands

²  Vertis BV, Kadijk 1 9747 AT Groningen, The Netherlands

Keygene applies molecular genetic research to support of plant breeders’ “breeding and selection efforts”. During the years many genetic maps were developed for a plethora of organisms. Giving access to this kind of data in an integrated and easy to use fashion is of crucial importance to breeders.
Here we present the development of a “traditional” datawarehouse and webportal for internet access to the molecular genetic data. The datawarehouse allows the storage of information at the species level (ic genetic maps) and at the individual organism level (ic the presence of a markers in each individual). The entire website and portal was build complying with J2EE standards using Oracles Application Server (9iAS). Genetic maps can be viewed individually and compared to other maps using a Flash (Macromedia) viewer. The presence (or absence) of individual markers in individual plants (lines etc) can be viewed in a tabular format. Information on the make-up of integrated genetic map data is available via a matrix display.
Getting the data from our production system and old file based legacy data, posed some serious ETL problems, especially proper use of marker and trait names.
An important aspect is the proprietary of most data, resulting in a situation where many data points can only be viewed by privileged users. Therefore, an environment was created where, depending on the ownership of the data, subsets of data are accessible. Access to the entire portal is via SSL and only predefined sites (based on IP address) currently have access.