m.senger@dkfz-heidelberg.de
Otto Ritter, DKFZ Heidelberg
o.ritter@dkfz-heidelberg.de
Petr Kocab, DKFZ Heidelberg
p.kocab@dkfz-heidelberg.de
Sandor Suhai, DKFZ Heidelberg
s.suhai@dkfz-heidelberg.de
IGD is an international project ( funded by the Commission of the European Union, contract GENE-CT93-0003, within the Human Genome Analysis Programme) aimed at developing an information management system for human genome researchers. As a database, IGD integrates and references genome related data from public sources, called Resource End Databases (IGD-REDs). These include GDB, OMIM, EMBL, GenBank, SWISS-PROT, PIR, RLDB, DNA Probe Bank, EUROGEM, CEPH-Genethon, CHLC, and several other databases, also on the mouse and farm animals. Resource databases are very heterogeneous in terms of their underlying data models and database managment systems, and they are completely autonomous - no collaboration is required from a potential RED site to become integrated into IGD.
Data from the IGD-REDs are periodically collected, reformatted, and exported to several IGD servers, called Target End Databases (IGD-TEDs). All the IGD-TEDs have the same conceptual schema but may differ in the physical implementation. As an analysis tool, IGD provides uniform interface to existing programs and program packages for structure and sequence analysis, genetic and physical map construction and analysis, etc.
The IGD server (IGD-TED) has two query interfaces:
Also, all IGD-TED data are dumped in two orthogonal partitioning schemes, namely by the database of origin, and by association with a specific human chromosome.
The IGD Front End client (IGD-FRED) uses a WWW browser (Mosaic) for several purposes: