GABAagent: a system for integrating data on GABA receptors.

Motivation: Scientific data pertaining to GABA receptors, which are of medical importance, ave widely scattered throughout numerous heterogeneous Internet resources. This situation has made the integrated acquisition of such data difficult and substantially time consuming even for researchers who ave Internet aficionados. Thus, there exists a genuine need for the development of Internet applications, such as GABAagent, which provide efficient and timely access to concise and integrated information. Results: We report here the establishment of a novel sewer (GABAagent) which has been written in Perl script, and which is freely accessible through the Internet. GABAagent is designed to assist researchers in retrieving focused and integrated information related to GABA receptors from various public domain databases. GABAagent relies on sewer-side flat-file databases that have been created through data mining from Internet sources such as the PubMed, DDBJ, SWISS-PROT and TrEMBL, in addition to the many World Wide Web (Web) sites which are accessible through Excite (E-Web). These warehouse databases are regularly updated and contain among other things, information concerning: (i) GABA receptor publications, (ii) DNA and protein sequences and (iii) the contents of related E-Web sites along with their addresses. Our system also provides hard links to the above-mentioned Web sites and E-Web sites; the feature which adds to it the character of virtual federation type of database. The current version of GABAagent provides two user-friendly services. The first is a search engine possessing intelligent query reformulation support (GABAengine), the second an elaborate email alert service was designed into the system (GABAalert). The GABAengine allows the user to search sewer-side databases exclusively for GABA receptor-related queries. Whereas, GABAalert allows the user by means of subscription, to receive immediate and/or monthly updates automatically.