Worm Community System

[Curtis Jamison]

In article <01HF4C20HHUA001SBT at LAFVAX.LAFAYETTE.EDU>, loerc at LAFVAX.LAFAYETTE.EDU (Curtis Loer) writes:
|> The message from Leon Avery reminded me:
|> What ever happened to the Worm Community System?
|> After I left San Francisco, and started here, I lost contact with WCS.

Alright! A chance for a shameless plug...

WCS is alive and well and living at NCSA, U of I. We have released a new
version, WCSr2 which contains all the functionality of the original, as 
well as some new functions. We are in the midst of fully updating all
the data and should be done by mid-August (We are using version 1.10
data from ACeDB right now. The final version of WCSr2 will contain
version 2.10 data).

WCS still provides access to literature, including abstracts from most
the CGC bibliography, full text from the gazette, and meeting abstracts.
The data includes genomic data from the MRC/WUSTL sequencing project, 
community data from the CGC about people and strains, and the beginnings
of a cellular database including cell lineage. New tools include a
thesaurus to aid in searching, and the ability to generate new links and 
add new data (with any level of security protection) which should aid
long-distance collaborations.

Requirements:
The new release of WCS requires an Internet connection from a Sun
workstation to access the the CSL server. This is because all the data,
search engines, thesaurus, etc reside here at UIUC (saving you lots
of storage at a minor speed cost). We suggest using a SparcStation 5,
SparcStation LX, SparcStation 10 or 20 (in that order). Much slower, but
still possible are SparcStation 2, 1+, or IPX. Whichever machine, you
need at least 32 Mb RAM and SunOS 4.1.x or Solaris 2.3 with the SunOS
4.*.* binary compatability package.

The local (front-end) software requires am X-windows environment and
about six Mb hard drive space (at present). We use both X11R5 and
OpenWindows with much success.

You can run a Macintosh node from the local Sun workstation, providing
you have an Ethernet connection between the workstation and the node.
Your Mac should have a minimum of 8 Mb RAM and should be in the 68040
family in order to run an X emulator. We use MacX for our Mac nodes.
Also, the monitor should have 1024x768 resolution, although the Apple
16" monitor (800x600) has been deemed as tolerable.

Where to get it:
The front-end to run WCS is available by anonymous ftp from
csl.ncsa.uiuc.edu (141.142.221.11). Installation instructions and 
configuration info is also available there in the README files. The
user's manual is also available, in Word 5.0 for Mac and Postscript
formats, as well as plain ASCII text.

WCS is a constantly evolving system, and we like to have feedback from
the community. If you have questions, requests, or even complaints, we'd
like to hear them. Send us a note at wcs at csl.ncsa.uiuc.edu

-- 
Curt Jamison
Community Systems Laboratory
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

jamison at csl.ncsa.uiuc.edu
___________________

These opinions are entirely my own and bear no relation 
to those of my employers and/or reality