Plant Genome III Conference Plant Genome III Conference
It is common practice to make biological information which is relevant to genome projects in diverse organisms electronically available via such mechanisms as FTP, Gopher and the World Wide Web. With the increasing volume of Internet-accessible data come issues of how best to establish community curation of this information, how to share and distribute new versions of data, and how to support different "views"of the same information. I will talk about some of the current efforts and issues regarding the establishment of a federated system of interoperable databases. I will focus on two curated biological databases we have developed which serve as a testbed for putting the concept of database interoperability into practice. EGAD is designed to represent genes with multiple transcripts, each of which may have a difference cellular role in each tissue and at different developmental stages. SST integrates DNA and protein sequence data with specimen, collection, and taxonomic information, SST interfaces directly with EGAD and employs EGAD's representation of DNA and protein sequences. SST provides taxonomic representation directly to EGAD. We have developed software which allows seamless cross-linking of EGAD and SST and supports curatorial efforts for both databases. Demonstrations of these databases are available at http://www.tigr.org.