CC-Share: Deploying Information-Sharing Services on Various Networks of Culture Collections

Natee Saelee

Authors: Supawadee Ingsriswang and Natee Saelee, National Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (BIOTEC), Thailand

Microbial cultures and associated information have been recognized as essential components for the development of the life sciences and biotechnology in research, industry and education. However, access to information on cultures held in the collections stored in several and heterogeneous databases around the world is extremely limited. The development of information networks is initiated at national, regional and global levels to provide the integrated access to distributed data sources. Encouraging institutional participation, the networks need to create the incentives in sharing of data, whereas the institution participating in various networks is required to improve the ability in dealing with information to be shared with diverse entities, different data standards and platforms.

This paper presents an information-sharing framework (CC-Share) for the culture collection institutions in making their data resources become more sharable and interoperable with other institutions and various networks. The framework have been designed and developed with the following main goals: (1) to achieve information sharing between our institution and any information networks, and (2) to make primary microbial data rapidly available to users. The CC-Share platform is an XML-based Web Service model. The data management interface, import/export and conversion tools are built to support the XML-based data format, so interoperability of CC-Share with other systems or networks is assured. The CC-Share portal maintains several CC-Share APIs, which are SOAP/WSDL based programmatic interfaces for access to the shared data on the culture collection. In addition, CC-Share registers and provides the ability to access several Web services offered by other databases using UDDI.


Keywords: Culture Collection, Information-Sharing, Interoperability, XML, Web Services