The Institute for Genomic Research is awarded a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) to develop a prototype procedure and tools to implement web services on a small number of databases in the Arabidopsis community. Over the past few years Arabidopsis thaliana research, funded by the NSF 2010 and other programs in the US and corresponding programs in the EU, has generated unprecedented amounts of data of broad scientific interest. Exploiting the full potential of these data requires accessibility and integration. While all data is being made public, the mechanism used is mostly by project-specific web sites that vary widely in format and content. This leads to a situation where it is very tedious to find all these sites and query each of them in order to e.g. compile all data available for a singe Arabidopsis gene. Web services provide a mechanism whereby data residing at many different locations can be seamlessly integrated to provide the user with richer data sets. This demonstration project is initiated to successfully deploy web services at approximately eight research sites in the US that vary both in the kinds of data that they host, and in the level of expertise of the PIs at the sites. Demonstration to the research community of the value of this method of data integration is expected to stimulate its progressively wider adoption as well as the development of a richer suite of tools/clients that will further enhance data integration. The broader impacts of this project are in the integration and dissemination of Arabidopsis data, much of it generated by 2010 projects, to the research community. Data will be directly accessible from the location at which it originates, and thus will be the most current. The project will carefully document the hardware and software requirements needed for any individual to provide his/her data via web services and will provide a "how to" manual to set this up. The results of these efforts will be reported and demonstrated at the annual International Arabidopsis Research Conference.
