This page describes technical details of SyMBA.
SyMBA is available to play with and test in a public sandbox version. Please note that the configuration at this url, while representing the current stable release, remains a sandbox configuration, and any data you upload to the server may be viewed by SyMBA developers or may be deleted at any time, without warning. We will, however, try to send out warning emails prior to any deletion of the database. As a sandbox implementation, it should not be used as a permanent archive for any data. If you wish to have an archive to store your high-throughput data, please contact us to see if we could collaborate in any way.
You may find the following useful:
There is now a general, all-purpose login to the sandbox (test) installation. The username is 'MickeyM' and the pass is 'MousePass'. Please feel free to use this account, and please send an email to the SyMBA developer's list if something is wrong with the account. However, if you want your own space, then please contact the same mailing list to request it.
The sandbox installation is a playground, and includes a few example experimental templates for you to play with. It is just an area where you can test the SyMBA web interface. However, the web interface is only a small part of the SyMBA project, and we encourage you to checkout the project from subversion (here's how) and have a more thorough look at it. This is not meant to be a large-scale repository, and may only have a few experiments in it at any one time, as we are constantly re-building the sandbox to reflect the latest changes to the codebase.
We reserve the right to stop and restart the SyMBA server at any time, and to drop and re-create the database at any time. You should not attempt to use this service as a long-term, permanent store. However, we encourage you to upload data and create as many experiments as you like so that you may determine if this application may be of use to your own research group. We also appreciate you contacting us with any comments or questions you may have.
Further, although we do have an LSID Resolution Service running via http://metagenome.ncl.ac.uk:8081/authority , and we do aim to ensure that object returned will always return the same thing, not every object identified with an LSID can currently be resolved via this service. This is still within the standard: if something resolves, it must always be to the same thing. However, you are free to test the LSID server now. More information on contacting the LSID Resolution Service will be added shortly, together with an example Java class.
Our back-end, and the XML produced by the front-end, is completely FuGE-compliant. CISBAN is part of the RSBI Consortium, which encourages the use of three main reporting standards for biological investigations: FuGE, OBI, and MIBBI. FuGE is a maturing standard data model for storing experimental metadata, OBI is a developing standard ontology for biological/biomedical experiments, and MIBBI is a new effort to standardize the minimum information needed to describe a biological experiment.
We have based the release numbering system on the Ubuntu style. This means that the number prefixing the "." is the year of the release, and the number after the "." is the month of the release. Therefore, release 7.03 was released in March 2007. Finally, we add a comment after the release number detailing whether the release is a beta version or a stable version.