European BioInformatics Institute

Contact:
European BioInformatics Institute
Wellcome Trust Genome Campus
Hinxton Cambridge CB10 1SD
UK

Tools Used
Various Oracle databases, Persistance's Object Builder, Persistance's Object Server, Object Request Brokers' from Iona Tecnologies, Visigenic Software, and SunSoft.

Benefits/Problems Solved
Information technology managers at the European BioInformatics Institute in Cambridge, England, are giving scientists worldwide direct online access to the largest database of DNA information in existence. Scientists trying to find cures for cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer's disease should be able to get needed research information faster thanks to an object-based combination of CORBA and Java technologies.

Instead of the current practice of submitting queries and having workers at the institute sift through the information in the database, more than 10,000 scientists in academic, pharmaceutical and biotechnology laboratories will be able to fire up their browsers and do more detailed searches themselves.

And they will have access to the information because developers are using the Java programming language and CORBA, which connects databases, clients and servers, to make the legacy information easily available.

The developers are using development tools and a server from Persistence Software, Inc. in San Mateo, Calif., to make the transition easier. The institute mainly has Oracle Corp. databases but has many others from a slew of vendors. They hold information on about a billion different strands of DNA sequences. With so many databases, it is hard to access them if a user doesn't know exactly where the information is.

The developers at European BioInformatics Institute used Persistence's Object Builder to create wrappers that encapsulate chunks of the database information and enable them to be accessed and shipped to the front end. They also use Persistence's Object Server, which takes the query and does the digging. Object request brokers from Iona Technologies, Inc., Visigenic Software, Inc. and SunSoft, Inc. ship the information to the client.

The institute also uses Java on the front end to ship the information across the Internet to the scientists. Because the Persistence tools, CORBA and Java are all platform-independent, they can access information on any of the databases and ship it easily anywhere on the Internet.

"The Persistence technology makes it easier for them to transform an old legacy relational database into virtually an object-oriented database without actually having to build a whole new database,'' said Karen Boucher, director of The Standish Group International, Inc. in Dennis, Mass. ``With Persistence, they're throwing an extra layer over the database like a blanket. That helps wrap the information into usable objects.''

Richard Browett, technical director at Valtech Ltd., an object-oriented consulting and training firm in London, said changing the way scientists access information should speed up research.

``By wrapping all the legacy information and letting scientists actually get their hands on it, we're serving them better,'' Browett said. ``And that's the focus.''

S. Gaudin, Computerworld -- 08-04-97, p. 55,l