Some future ideas

[David Martin]

I had som ethoughts about future expansions of EMBOSS and really want to
put down a few 'placemarkers' to see what people think.

	Eventually people are going to get the idea that EMBOSS should be
able to do things with data other than just sequences and want to run
e.g. microarray and structure type analyses. With the current database
definitions in emboss.default there is a type: clause that is not
required. I would propose to make this mandatory and extend the values. 

N is nucleotide sequence database
P is protein sequence database
S is a structure database
M is a microarray experiment database.

The USA can then be extended to cover structures (pdb:1HTF) for an example
and microarray experiments. There are probably other entities that could
be included.

With some careful type management we could even convert types on the fly,
so you could put in a pdb reference when asked for a protein sequence and
it would be automatically derived (OK, there are a lot of problems with
such things but it would be useful).


Other possibilities: 

XML format output in some suitable XML format? This would probably need
a lot of work in the libraries to tidy everything up and make it work.


Still looking for a student to write an EMBOSS-WAP interface ;-)

..d





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