Objectives

The XSPAN project aims to provide seamless access to existing ontologies of developmental anatomy of some key model organisms: mouse, drosophila, C. elegans, zebrafish and human.

Access and query software use rules and translation tables to support inter-operability between anatomy ontologies while a prototype of a formal ontology for cross-species anatomy links into the species-specific anatomy ontologies to provide support for identifying and hypothesizing cross-species tissue equivalents.

The Project uses IBM's DB2 for data warehousing running on a DELL PC, with the web interface powered by Apache Tomcat . Many thanks to IBM who have supplied a full copy of DB2 for use by XSPAN.

The project includes formal evaluation of XSPAN's ability to provide useful assistance in inter-operating between the anatomies of the different species.