The CEREALAB database: Ongoing research and future challenges

Abstract

The objective of the CEREALAB database is to help the breeders in choosing molecular markers associated to the most important traits. Phenotypic and genotypic data obtained from the integration of open source databases with the data obtained by the CEREALAB project are made available to the users. The first version of the CEREALAB database has been extensively used within the frame of the CEREALAB project. This paper presents the main achievements and the ongoing research related to the CEREALAB database. First, as a result of the extensive use of the CEREALAB database, several extensions and improvements to the web application user interface were introduced. Second, always derived from end-user needs, the notion of provenance was introduced and partially implemented in the context of the CEREALAB database. Third, we describe some preliminary ideas to annotate the CEREALAB database and to publish it in the Linking Open Data network. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.