Peter.Stoehr@embl.bitnet (Peter Stoehr) (02/05/91)
Prakash Nadkarni asks in: Message-ID: <9102042110.AA28658@genbank.bio.net> >I am interested in the capabilities of the CD-ROM software distributed >by EMBL- specifically, in database searching? Rival Packages by >Hitachi (and a beta version of the latest GCG) allow search of >Genbank/PIR by author, by sequence name, and by Keyword. They do not allow >search with compound boolean criteria, nor search using arithmetic operations > (eg. restrict answers using the aforesaid boolean criteria to sequences greate r >than 100 nt long). >Does the EMBL software do any of these things? Could someone at EMBL let me >know? Yes. The software on the EMBL CD-ROM allows searching by entryname, accession number, authors, journal citation, feature key, database cross-references, *free text* including keywords, and date. A query is entered into a screen form. Boolean operators AND/OR/NOT operate within fields, and an implicit AND operates between fields. For all the text fields, an index of terms can be browsed and selected from (eg list of journal abbreviations). Sequence length is actually not something we currently index. It's not so easy to convey its full beauty in words, but we have some 'spare' free CD's from past releases that you can try. Just supply postal address if you want one. I would add that we do not see our CD-ROM or software as a rival to Hitachi, GCG et al. The software allows the user to find and extract data from the EMBL and SWISS-PROT databases. For further analysis of this data, other packages exist. (The CD-ROM can also be used for FASTA searches quite effectively). Regards, Peter Stoehr EMBL Data Library