Providing a white page service to the Human Genome Project

As the Human Genome Project grows, so does the number of genome users, activities, organizations, and databases. There is a need to provide an electronic white page service to genome users, so that a genome user can for instance find out the e-mail address of a remote genome user or the network address of a genome database server. Because of the distributed and heterogeneous nature of the Human Genome Project, such an electronic white page service should be based on an open systems standard, i.e., a standard independent of any vendor. In this paper, we propose the use of X.500, an international open systems standard which can provide the needed white page service