A proposal for a standard CORBA interface for genome maps

Motivation:The scientific community urgently needs to standardize the excha nge of biological data. This is helped by the use of a common protocol and the definition of shared data structures. We have based our standardization work on CORBA, a technology, that has become a standard in the past years and allows interoperability between distributed objects. Results: We have defined an IDL specification for genome maps and present i t to the scientific community We have implemented CORBA sewers based on thi s IDL to distribute RHdb and HuGeMap maps. The IDL will co-evolve with the needs of the mapping community.