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parser <strong>and</strong> documentation files, <strong>and</strong> gives easy access to improvements by members<br />
of the SRS community.<br />
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Additionally, DATABANKS offers an easy way to check for database updates by<br />
comparing database sizes <strong>and</strong> release numbers between alternative sites. We also<br />
believe that DATABANKS may be of help to curators of centrally maintained<br />
database catalogues. They could utilize the extensive database documentation<br />
collected, which is assured to be current by automatic compilation of material from<br />
active servers.<br />
SRS Servers World Wide<br />
To date, the EMBL-EBI’s list of public SRS servers contains 35 sites in 24 countries.<br />
Together they provide the scientific community with access to around 250 different<br />
databases <strong>and</strong> over 1000 databank copies. Each SRS server locally stores such a list<br />
of known public servers. When a local version of DATABANKS is compiled at a<br />
site, the lists from all visited servers are inspected <strong>and</strong> the site’s local list is extended<br />
by including any new servers found. This removes the necessity of a central site to<br />
which new public servers must be reported. The association of public servers thus<br />
functions as a distributed system without the need for a centralized or hierarchical<br />
structure. To our knowledge, already 6 sites compile their local versions of<br />
DATABANKS. DATABANKS provides users with an up to date direct gateway into<br />
the ever growing network of databanks, whilst making life easier for server<br />
administrators.<br />
Conclusion <strong>and</strong> Future Works<br />
The SRS system is widely used in the bioinformatics <strong>and</strong> molecular biology<br />
community to access biological information in the form of flat files. We can ascribe<br />
this to a successful model of collaborative integration, where the SRS system<br />
administrators collaborate by exchanging structure descriptions <strong>and</strong> parsers for the<br />
databanks. This has also been possible thanks to the easy descriptions of flat file<br />
databanks using the Icarus language <strong>and</strong> the clear separation of site specific<br />
configurations from databank specific information.<br />
In this chapter, after outlining the core features of SRS: parsing, indexing, linking<br />
<strong>and</strong> querying, we focused on recent developments concerning the World Wide Web<br />
interface, applications, views <strong>and</strong> the Databank of DATABANKS. However, there is<br />
more to come as the SRS system is continuously evolving. Current developments<br />
deal with providing permanent SRS sessions that a user or a group of users can create<br />
<strong>and</strong> then access later, <strong>and</strong> also generating SRS wrappers for different kinds of clients<br />
in a client/server architecture.<br />
The client/server paradigm is based on the conceptual distinction between<br />
‘servers’ that are st<strong>and</strong> alone software components that provide ‘services’ (data <strong>and</strong><br />
operations that manipulate this data) <strong>and</strong> ‘clients’ that use these services. The first<br />
wrappers we provide are CORBA wrappers. CORBA (Common Object Request
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