A new design for the genome sequence data base

Five years have passed since the Genome Sequence DataBase (GSDB, but at that time GenBank) implemented a first version of the Electronic Data Publishing (EDP) paradigm. The database operation is again being completely redesigned, with the overall philosophy of continually measuring and improving the services provided. The three major goals of the redesign are to: (1) bring the implementation of EDP to maturity by supporting on-line editing by the community; (2) facilitate third-party annotation in order to stay up to date with the on-going discovery process involved in fully characterizing existing sequences; and (3) modularize genome data services by designing GSDB to rely on other public databases for data not central to the DNA sequence database. This article describes the design requirements and the new schema