Over the past few years, development of the WormBase user interface has focused on building a consistent interface comprised of informationally rich displays and user friendly tools for data visualization. This development has been driven by a flood of data culled from literature and large scale analyses by the relentless team of curators at WormBase.

User interface development has now shifted to a fundamental rearchitecture of the software that drives WormBase. What should users expect from this redesign? At first glance, nothing new. The rearchitecture is designed to replicate the current WormBase look-and-feel.

Under the surface, however, will be a highly configurable and responsive user interface. A My WormBase section of the website will allow users to build a page that contains a browsing history and often-accessed information. Perhaps you would rather have WormBase look more like Ensembl, NCBI or Flybase? Maybe you would like to hide the display of references on the gene page? Such options will be configurable across the site enabling users to build displays that best suit their needs. Pages will also be more flexible. They will respond to range-based queries and display results in a contextually-sensitive manner consistent with the type of query and number of items retrieved.

The new site will be directly accessible to data mining. Each human readable section label on individual pages can become a target. Such targets can be accessed by a simple programming interface, enabling users to write efffective data mining scripts quickly and easily. For example, a script could be written to fetch all of the brief identifications listed on the Gene Summary page.

Many elements of the rearchitecture will be invisible to end users. Major under-the-hood features include a consistent programming interface for WormBase developers; the ability to generically support additional genomes and species; the ability to be driven from multiple data sources; and maintenance of a persistent browsing state for users.

As always, WormBase welcomes your feedback. Please send your questions, comments, or suggestions to help@wormbase.org.