====== extract about MEOW service from William Gelbart, Feb 1999

To remind you, the goal we discussed was to establish a common
interface for the major model eukaryotic organism databases.  This
interface would be offered as the default homepage for
nonspecialists wishing to access any of the participating
databases.  This homepage would be maintained by Don Gilbert
through his IUBio server and mirrored nightly to all participating
servers.  Don has kindly agreed to work with us on this project.  I
think that page organization should be developed from first principles
and should not look like any of our existing WWW sites.

This home page would provide gene/gene product query access to based
on gene symbol, gene product characteristics, chromosome position and
perhaps homology (if we can agree on criteria to be used).  Our view
is that this will satisfy the needs of many nonspecialist users
without forcing them to learn the intricasies and idiosyncracies of
each of our sites.  (Personally, I think many specialist users would
find this helpful as well.)  We do need to discuss what else this top
level page might contain (e.g., links to the specialty model organism
DB home pages, other things?).

We had discussed a design principle that each gene "page" would
contain no more than one screenful of information.  Further, the gene
pages should as much as possible focus on coin-of-the-realm molecular
biological terminology rather than species-specific jargon.  I suggest
we try to flesh out what a typical page would contain.  Here are some
suggestions for relevant fields on the "gene report page", in order to
get a discussion started:

*Valid terms:
        -Gene symbol
        -Gene full name
        -Gene identifier number

*Synonyms:
        -Symbol synonyms
        -Full name synonyms
        -Secondary gene identifier numbers

*Map location information:
        -Chromosome and genetic map position
        -Molecular map information (simple graphic of DNA length,
          encoded transcript(s) and CDS(s) if available)

*Gene product information:
        -Functional information (from function ontology if available)
        -Structural information (from InterProt)
        -Homology information with other "MEOW" organisms (we would
          need to agree on some computable criteria for this field,
          which is of course not trivial)

*Links to extended gene information in the specialty model organism DBs.

*Brief free text gene summary (a few lines at most).

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The idea that there would be one group providing the gene lists and
gene records for each organism.  As I understand from our discussion,
prototype development would involve the following groups for their
organism:

Mouse: MGD;
  Janan Eppig, contact;
    WWW site: http://www.informatics.jax.org/

Drosophila: FlyBase;
  Bill Gelbart, Michael Ashburner, Gerry Rubin, contacts;
    WWW site: http://flybase.bio.indiana.edu/

Zebrafish: ZFIN
  Monte Westerfield, contact;
    WWW site: http://zfish.uoregon.edu/zf_info/infmtx.html

Arabidopsis: AtDB;
  Mike Cherry, contact;
    WWW site: http://genome-www.stanford.edu/Arabidopsis/

Saccharomyces: SGD & YPD;
  Mike Cherry, David Botstein & Jim Garrels, contacts;
    WWW sites: http://www.proteome.com/YPDhome.html
               http://genome-www.stanford.edu/Saccharomyces/

C. elegans: ACeDB;
  Richard Durbin & Jonathan Hodgkins, contacts;
    WWW site: to be determined

Human: NCBI, others?
  Jim Ostell, others?
    WWW site: Jim, what is the word on the human
       reference sequence records?