Databases and Systems

Figure 7. A SWISS-PROT entry with its sequence shown by a Java applet as a
hydropathicity plot. The applet can be controlled to display other amino acid
properties or to show the curve with a larger scale.
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Since a single root entry may be linked to many leaf entries it is sometimes useful
to have only the number of linked entries displayed. The SRSWWW server shows
this number as a hypertext link that when clicked retrieves the list of leaf entries. The
number is of value itself and can be used for statistics. For instance, using an example
of a link from the TAXONOMY [16] databank to GENBANK one could obtain a
table of taxa together with the number of GENBANK entries that exist for all
organisms each taxon represents.
SRS World Wide: The Databank of DATABANKS
Locating an appropriate server is only the first problem users face when exploring
new databases, since there are as many different query interfaces as there are
databanks. Documentation relating to the databanks and manuals describing the
interfaces vary greatly in content and form, and are often not easily obtained.
In this section we focus on a newly added component within SRS version 5.1 [ 17]
which generates DATAB ANKS, a database of databanks, by traversing public SRS
servers around the world. In SRS, the documentation for each databank can be
viewed as the respective ‘databank information page’ via the SRSWWW interface.
The databank information page has a standardized layout for easy reference and also
includes server status data on indexing of the respective databank. Both the parser
and the databank documentation files can be requested from SRS for reuse at other
sites. By pooling the knowledge gathered at these worldwide sites, SRS now provides
both a unified method for direct access to around 250 different databases and a
standard framework for their documentation. Automated nightly compilation of the
data guarantees that the overview is up to date.
The documentation collected in DATABANKS is written by the community of
SRS server administrators. In a collaborative effort, it is regularly updated and
extended in a distributed manner.