> WAIS seems to be a very good tool
> for searching *unstructured* databases, but there must be something better
> for *structured* databases.
IRX can do searches on restricted fields. It was our hope to put
together some code to have WAIS communicate with IRX (this was
estimated to be a few weeks worth of work). This way WAIS users could
pass queries to IRX using the WAIS front end remotely and we wouldn't
have to maintain ***yet another copy*** of the database for WAIS
searches. This task just hasn't risen high enough up the priority
list for action though and may very well not before the end of our
contract. I was recently approached by Tom Rindfleisch at SUMEX-AIM
about collaborating on this, but we had to decline to commit
resources. There does seem to be interest in implementing this
solution, so if someone else has the time to put the code together, we
might be interested in using it.
Sincerely,
Dave Kristofferson
GenBank Manager
kristoff at genbank.bio.net
