GeneCards (Rebhan et al., 1998) has made innovative strides: (a). regular updates and enhancements incorporating new genes enriched with sequences, genomic locations, cDNA assemblies, orthologies, medical information, 3D protein structures, gene expression, and focused SNP summaries; (b). restructured software using object-oriented Perl, migration to schema-driven XML, and (c). pilot studies, introducing methods to produce cards for novel and predicted genes.

GeneCards TM (http://bioinfo.weizmann.ac.il/cards/) is an automated, integrated database of human genes, genomic maps, proteins, and diseases, with software that retrieves, consolidates, searches, and displays human genome information [1,2]. Over the past few years, the system has consistently added new features including sequence accessions, genomic locations, cDNA assemblies, orthologies, medical information, 3D protein structures, SNP summaries, and gene expression. In parallel, its infrastructure is being upgraded to use object-oriented Perl [3] to produce, display, and search data that is formatted in Extensible Markup Language (XML -(http://www.w3.org/XML), providing a basis for schemadriven display code and context-specific searches.

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