MaizeGDB: The Maize Model Organism Database for Basic, Translational, and Applied Research

Figure 2

Simplified infrastructure of MaizeGDB. The community of maize researchers can add data to the database (downward-facing arrows from the uppermost yellow box) via direct data deposition (upper left) and via a set of Community Curation Tools that interacts with the Curation Database (upper center). Researchers are also allowed access to maize data (upward-facing arrows from the lower dashed box) via a web interface that can be accessed at http://www.maizegdb.org/ (upper right) and by way of SQL access to the Curation Database, which houses the most up-to-date data available (upper center). These functionalities are supported by two of the three environments: Production and Staging, respectively (upper dashed gold boxes). Available for use by MaizeGDB personnel to facilitate data modeling and trial programming manipulations is a third environment called Test (lower left dashed gold box), which is identical to the Staging Environment. To ensure that the most up-to-date copy of the database is backed up, a Disaster Recovery process has been instituted (lower center dashed gold box) whereby a compressed copy of the database is backed up to a separate machine in Ames, Iowa daily, and to a server in Columbia, Missouri weekly.