CABRI
Common Access to Biological Resources and Information
FAQ (or how to be satisfied when accessing this site)
How to search CABRI
In this section:
- How many catalogues are included in the CABRI site?
- When and how often are CABRI catalogues updated?
- How can I search the CABRI catalogues?
- What are the advantages of the Simple Search?
- What are the advantages of the SRS interface?
- What are the advantages of the HyperCatalogue?
- How many catalogues are included in the CABRI site?
- At present (February 12, 2004), there are 28 catalogues, including more
than 100,000 items.
- When and how often are CABRI catalogues updated?
- CABRI catalogues are normally updated twice a year.
- How can I search the CABRI catalogues?
- There are different systems for searching CABRI catalogues:
the CABRI Simple Search, the standard SRS interface and the
CABRI HyperCatalogue. All these systems rely on the SRS
search engine and allow for the ordering of retrieved
strains.
- What are the advantages of the Simple Search?
- The CABRI Simple Search is a specialised and simplified
user interface that implements searches by accession number,
by scientific name and by free text.
Searching by accession number is particularly suitable when you already know the strain you are interested in and you simply want to retrieve its description or order it. It is important to point out that searching by accession number also allows you to retrieve strains by using numbers of catalogues which are not included in CABRI, since this search also accesses information on other culture collection numbers of the strains, when this data is present in the catalogue.
Searching by scientific name is suitable when you know the organism you are interested in and want to see which strains are available. In this case, the support for a synonyms' search is also offered.
Free text searching is suitable when you are more interested in a special feature of the strains, that can be included in any other field of the catalogues. For the best results, CABRI catalogues include all the information that can be useful to best describe all the properties of the strains, not only the basic data which is needed to correctly identify them. - What are the advantages of the SRS interface?
- Searching CABRI catalogues by the SRS standard interface is
also possible. This offers the advantage of having the same user
interface that is available in some of the best known scientific
web sites for searching molecular biology databases. It is
therefore suitable for researchers who are already accustomed
to this interface. Another advantage is that
it allows for the navigation and searching of indexes. This can
noticeably improve the ability to reach desired results.
- What are the advantages of the HyperCatalogue?
- For the user, the HyperCatalogue consists of a set of
static web pages which list by catalogue, name and accession
number all strains and cell lines that are included in
the CABRI catalogues.
These pages are hierarchically structured so that the
user can access the list of items of his/her interest in only a
few steps.
The detailed information for selected strains is finally
retrieved by using the SRS implementation.
The CABRI HyperCatalogue system was implemented
to improve accessibility of CABRI catalogues for
those researchers using general search engines such as Altavista
and Google. These are not able to adequately access SRS
and archive all the information included in the CABRI
system. However, it became a useful navigation
tool that allows for quick identification of strains
of interest to the users.
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Last revised:
February 2023
This work cannot be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written permission of the CABRI consortium.