ICIS - information for developers

and all others interested

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The International Crop Information System (ICIS) is a collection of databases (public and private), and associated query tools to assist plant breeding programs with its bioinformatics needs. At present information related to the cultivars and data from field tests is available in these three crop databases  .

The International Crop Information System (ICIS) is setup as a generic crop information system to manage germplasm pedigrees and associated experimental data.
Passport and phenotypic data on germplasm and breeding lines are available from many sources in various electronic formats.  The ICIS database system collated these data into a single format to enable strategic interrogation.

The two most important components of ICIS are Genealogy Management System (GMS) and Data Management System (DMS).
Genealogy Management System (GMS) stores and manages information on genesis, genealogy, nomenclature, breeding methodology and chronology of germplasm for a particular crop.
Data Management System (DMS) is designed for capturing experimental data.
It embodies a generic data model structured with n-way indexed ‘observation units’ coupled with experimental variables. Sets of observation units are grouped to represent a particular round of experiments. This kind of data model facilitates queries that integrate related data across many independent studies.

For each GCP crop the construction of a specialized portal is scheduled. An ICIS portal will provide a "one stop shopping" query interface to ICIS information, the ICIS databases, globally on the World Wide Web. Query options will be available for specialized views, such as the study and view.
ICIS development is led by the IRRI-CIMMYT Crop Research Informatics Laboratory (CRIL) team.
The networking technology uses for these implementations makes use of special GCP MOBY data types derived from the GenerationCP domain models and ontology, plus a special software engineering platform to interconnect available data sources.

On the freely accessible ICISwiki pages display elaborate and updated information on the ICIS management, facilities, progress and workshops of the ICIS facilities, databases and portals is available. On the Cropforge pages a section dedicated to ICIS development can be found. Currently the Cropforge pages host 18 ICIS projects, ranging from ICIS communication, workbook templates, Java, VB and Fortran interfaces, Web interfaces, Java tools and more.


The goal of comparative biology and knowledge transfer between crops will be feasible by querying different ICIS crop implementations.
At present ICIS is implemented for wheat, rice and maize. 
For the other GCP mandate crops  - barley, cotton, potato, maize, chick pea, cow pea, sugar cane and sweet potato - the ICIS implementations are under construction.

reference:
Portugal A, Balachandra R, Metz T, Bruskiewich R, McLaren G. 2007. International crop information system for germplasm data management. Methods Mol Biol. 406:459-71.



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