Overview:

The Molecular Information Agent (MIA) is a web interface to an extensible, object-oriented WWW cross-reference search and retrieval system developed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The goal of MIA is to allow users to easily search the internet to find all current information for a molecule of interest. MIA has built-in heuristics that direct it to appropriate resources for different types of queries. It also has text parsers for each resource; these parsers allow MIA to scan database entries for links to other resources and prevent invalid links from being incorporated in the search results page. Since the MIA search process can take several mintues to complete, users can receive results by email and/or save the results in our server's database to be retrieved later. A quick summary of how the engine behind MIA operates:

Given a specific type of keyword (e.g., a four-character PDB code, or a NCBE GI accession number), we consult a list of templates that predefine queries to data resources that use the specified keyword as an index. For example, with the PDB code 1ATP, we can retrieve not only the 1ATP entry from the PDB database, but also entries in other databases containing structural information such as SCOP (www.pdb.bnl.gov/scop/search.cgi?key=1ATP) or CATH (www.biochem.ucl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/cath/CATHSrch.pl?query=1ATP&type=PDB).

The results of each database query are parsed and additional keywords are indentified. Specific information can be extracted, if desired, as a synopsis of the result. The search ends, when all template queries have been attempted and no further keywords can be extracted from the search results.

Send suggestions/questions to MIA developers