Building a Search Engine for Interoperability among Taxonomic, Phylogenetic, and Molecular Databases through the Web

Jiakuan Chen Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Biodiversity Science and Ecological Engineering, and Institute of Biodiversity Science, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China As the amount of electronically available biological information accumulates rapidly, it is necessary to develop new techniques to promote database interoperability. A simple and effective approach that uses an ad hoc search engine is developed to allow users to browse and search taxonomic, phylogenetic, and molecular database systems via the World Wide Web. A prototype system, I-STAR, which provides query interoperationsfrom local botanical databases to three Web-based biological database systems, W3TROPICOS, TreeBASE, and GenBank, is implemented at Fudan University (htlp://www.ibsfu.