Motivation: Links between biological objects are frequently used by researchers in biology. However, many of the links found in public databases are insufficiently documented and difficult to retrieve. Virgil introduces the idea of a rich link, i.e. the link itself and the related pieces of information. Virgil was developed to collect, manage and distribute such links.
Results: At the moment, Virgil is a prototype database that contains rich links between GDB genes and Genbank sequences. The Virgil data model is rich enough to describe comprehensively a link between two biological objects. Two different means to access the information were developed: a schema-driven Web interface and a CORBA server.
Availability: http://www.infobiogen. fr/services/virgil/home.html
Contact: [email protected]