About SPICE

Established in 1998, SPICE is a research project carrying out fundamental research into a new robust and scalable federated architecture for Species 2000. The SPICE project has developed the distributed-computing engine that runs the Dynamic Checklist: "wrappers" that allow a number of species databases to be queried simultaneously, returning a uniform list of results.

The SPICE project is funded by the UK's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Participating organisations are the University of Reading, Cardiff University, the University of Southampton, the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London and the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew.

Further reading

A.C. Jones, X. Xu, N. Pittas, W.A. Gray, N.J. Fiddian, R.J. White, J.S. Robinson, F.A. Bisby and S.M. Brandt, SPICE: A Flexible Architecture for Integrating Autonomous Databases to Comprise a Distributed Catalogue of Life, Proc. 11th Int. Conference and Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2000), Springer-Verlag (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), 10pp, September 2000