A proposal for a standard CORBA interface for genome maps.

Motivation:The scientific community urgently needs to standardize the exchange of biological data. This is helped by the use of a common protocol and the definition of shared data structures. We have based our standardization work on CORBA, a technology, that has become a standard in the past years and allows interoperability between distributed objects. Results: We have defined an IDL specification for genome maps and present it to the scientific community We have implemented CORBA sewers based on this IDL to distribute RHdb and HuGeMap maps. The IDL will co-evolve with the needs of the mapping community.