THE NEW VIRGIL DATABASE - A SERVICE OF RICH LINKS

Motivation: Links between biological objects are frequently used by re searchers in biology. However; many of the links found in public datab ases are insufficiently documented and difficult to retrieve. Virgil i ntroduces the idea of a rich link, i.e. the link itself and the relate d pieces of information. Virgil was developed to collect, manage and d istribute such links. Results: At the moment, Virgil is a prototype da tabase that contains rich links between GDB genes and Genbank sequence s. The Virgil data model is rich enough to describe comprehensively a link between two biological objects. Two different means to access the information were developed: a schema-driven Web interface and a CORBA server.