ICIS IMIS development

From ICISWiki

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Connecting the Maize Field Book to IMIS 3 Publishing Maize Genebank Data 4 Procedure on converting the Maize Finder database to GMSInput’s Maize Pedigree input table.

Introduction

CIMMYT currently has three Maize Information Systems:

• the Maize Field Book system used to manage several breeding projects independently,
• the Maize Finder database used to accumulate maize trial data from international nurseries and maize breeding projects, and
• the Maize Genebank management system.

A decision was taken in January 2006 to integrate current systems with an ICIS-based Maize Information System, IMIS.

This integration will be somewhat harder than the integration of wheat systems with ICIS for two reasons. Firstly, ICIS inherited many features of the old IWIS system and secondly maize will need a massive curation exercise to document pedigree relationships in the ICIS format.

First steps in the integration process are:

• develop a skeleton IMIS-CENTRAL-GMS using the list of genebank accessions and the list of germplasm in Maize Finder,
• connect the Maize Field Book system to an IMIS local database,
• integrate the Maize Finder database with the IMIS-CENTRAL-GMS,
• connect the maize Genebank system to a local IMIS implementation, and
• publish Maize accession and characterization data through the Crop Finder web application.

These steps will ensure integration of maize information in an ICIS system while minimizing disruption to existing systems. Maize breeding projects will have a choice to continue using the Maize Field Book or to adopt ICIS applications and the data will still be integrated.

Information of cultivars, breeding lines and germplasm accessions will be available in the same system and regional and external partners will have full access to all public information.

Connecting the Maize Field Book to IMIS

The Maize Field Book (MFB) is a mature, powerful Excel application for managing breeding activities for a particular project. Current development activities include implementing a system for managing nomenclature and strengthening facilities for analyzing pedigrees. These are difficult to develop in Excel macros and are relative strengthens of the ICIS system. Hence an integration of Maize Field Book with a local ICIS back-end seems to be a logical solution.

Work with Dr. Vivek in Zimbabwe has identified the MFB consolidation process as the easiest point of intervention. The consolidation process is a macro that is run at the end of each cycle to consolidate inventory information and evaluation data. Pedigree relationships, nomenclature and evaluation data can be harvested at this stage and stored in ICIS. A parser to harvest the pedigree and nomenclature information in being developed on-IRRI.

Functions within the MFB which use this data can gradually be adapted to get it from ICIS using the DLL or by directly accessing Access tables.

Publishing Maize Genebank Data

A prototype web interface to Maize Genebank data has been set-up at http://sas.cimmyt.org/CropFinder. The interface uses a Crop Finder Data Warehouse system designed by Jens Riis at CIMMYT and a query interface implemented by Juan Carlos Alarcon at CIMMYT.

Procedure on converting the Maize Finder database to GMSInput’s Maize Pedigree input table.

1. Open the MS Access database file “MaizeFinder data to GMSInput.mdb”, and link all the tables from the MS Access database file “MaizeFinderData.mdb”.
2. Inside the “MaizeFinder_data_to_GMSInput.mdb” is a table called GMSInput_MaizeTemplate where the table has the structure where GMSInput uses for parsing the CIMMYT’s maize pedigree and some extra fields that will be needed for the conversion.
3. Click on the Queries tab and run the stored queries from ICIS1_RetrieveMaizeIDRecord up to ICIS9_FillinTypeOfGermForMale.
4. Some values for the TypeOfGermplasm in the GMSInput_MaizeTemplate table may not have been filled in due to missing values in the TypeOfMaterial field in the tblMaizeID, so the user must manually determine whether if the maize entry is a “L” for line, “P” for population or “H” for Hybrid. Please remember that supplying the wrong value for this field may lead GMSInput to incorrectly parse the entries in the GMS database.
5. Copy the GMSInput_MaizeTemplate table to your working local database and start GMSInput.