BioStandards's anniversary...
a look back over the past year

The BioStandards project started last year March as a two year pilot project in industry support for bioinformatics. Jointly funded by EMBL, the EU and pharmaceutical industry, the project is on its way to become a big success. Initially, it was envisioned that about eight pharmaceutical companies would sign up in the first year, but that number has been exceeded with nineteen (see Table 1) companies joining in the first nine months of the project.

BioStandards Meetings

Several meetings were held last year with the industry partners to discuss the project and to ensure that the content and deliverables matched the need of industry. The first meetings were mainly focussed on selecting content and refining it, while the last two meetings were primarily used to report the progress made in the several areas of the project. During those last two meetings, further initiatives were also proposed and resources were allocated to them by acceptance of the industry partners.

Workshops

Part of the 'awareness, education and training' aspect of the BioStandards project is providing tutorial and discussion workshops on several regions of interest related to bioinformatics in pharmaceutics. In the first year of this project, eight workshops were held. The demand for those workshops was very high, which resulted, unfortunately, in that we had to restrict the participation to some workshops because of the lack of sufficient spare workstations or terminals for the hands-on part. Workshops which were in high demand will be repeated; the first one which will be the workshop on CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture). Table 2 lists the workshops of the past year.

Database and software developments

Although this is only the first year of the project, significant results have been obtained in this area. On the database side, the EBI is now providing express flatfile database (nucleotides & proteins) updates on CD-ROM to our industry partners, production support for DSSP and HSSP databases has been moved from the EMBL (Heidelberg) to EBI and last but not least the FSSP production (i.e. the Dali server) has also been moved from EMBL to EBI. Response time in processing a submission to Dali decreases because at EBI more computer resources are available. Furthermore, together with our industry partners we are in the process of improving the structure of EST data.
With regard to software the following developments are of importance: we have reviewed and developed prototypes for the visualisation of biological data, carried out an assessment of Smith and Waterman sequence searching tools on specialist hardware and developed new CORBA services and clients for sequence alignments and searching and further developed the WWW interface to GCG (W2H). Related to the visualisation area, we also participate in the bioWidget consortium in an effort to develop reusable graphical user interface componentry.
Other deliverables are still underway and will be completed in the next year (exploration of the potential for the acquisition of ligand and protein function data, carrying out a security assessment regarding network access to the EBI network services from industry, evaluation of existing gene finding programs and the development of interface tools for the manipulation of constructed sequences).

Information supplied by: EBI BioStandards Project

Resources and further information

• The Industry Support programme WWW server
  http://industry.ebi.ac.uk/
• with public available information about the BioStandards project
  http://industry.ebi.ac.uk/public/BioStandards-info.html
• The EBI WWW server
  http://www.ebi.ac.uk/
• general information
  http://www.ebi.ac.uk/info/info.html
• research
  http://www.ebi.ac.uk/rd/research.html
• services
  http://www.ebi.ac.uk/services/services.html
• WWW interface to GCG
• the source
  http://industry.ebi.ac.uk/w2h/
• a demo
  http://industry.ebi.ac.uk/w2hdemo/
• Visualisation support at EBI
  http://industry.ebi.ac.uk/~alan/VisSupp/VisAware/index.html
• HyperBolic Tree Viewer
  http://industry.ebi.ac.uk/~alan/BioWidget/
• Semantic Lenses
  http://industry.ebi.ac.uk/~alan/SemanticLenses/
• bioWidget consortium
  http://goodman.jax.org/projects/biowidgets/consortium/
• Meetings and workshops details (industry partners only!)
  http:/industry.ebi.ac.uk/private/meetings-activities.html
• Sequence Search Assessment report
  http://industry.ebi.ac.uk/~thanaraj/seqassess/report.html

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Direct questions or comments to Bioinformer Editor. This page last modified Friday, 16 July, 1999.
ISSN 1462-1363. More information about the BioInformer.

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