GENOME DATABASES IP-address restricted. For most pages, a basic, custom-made CMS system is used. The system runs on PHP and makes use of .db ﬁles. The key character in the ﬁle is the pipe ‘j’ character. The presence of the pipe character deﬁnes the string in front of it as an identiﬁer. Page content is primarily stored in a ﬁle with the ‘.db’ extension, which is parsed by the display-ﬁle.PHP script to generate dhtml that can be read by any browser. As the ﬁle is read, the pipe ‘j’ character is recognised and used for two purposes: (1) to identify the ﬁle’s content and (2) to display special content. Another key character is the ‘$’ character, which displays prede- ﬁned content in combination with reserved words. For instance, ‘$last_modiﬁed_date’ displays the date that the database was last modiﬁed. Access restrictions Being a public database, access to the ETHNOS v2.0 pages is unrestricted; there is no need to sub- scribe to query the databases. Access to the admin- istration section of the databases is, however, restricted. This is made possible through a com- bined IP address-restricted and password-protected interface (Figure 2D). A special administrator’s menu appears when the database is accessed from a previously speciﬁed IP address from which the administrator can access the database contents for modiﬁcation or update. The current interface does not support simultaneous data entry and/or modiﬁ- cation by more than one curator. Online HTML editor The built-in, custom-made wysiwygPRO online editor (http://www.wysiwygpro.com) is mainly used for basic ﬁles and the navigation bar. This editor has full HTML capabilities but requires HTML literacy. The ETHNOS v2.0 software makes use of this editor for full text formatting and straightforward text entry from word processors used for the disease summaries and genetic labora- tories ﬁles. The online editor also allows tables and hyperlinks to be inserted and images to be included. Editing ﬁles with the wysiwygPRO van Baal et al. online editor currently excludes the use of special characters like ‘j’ and ‘$’. Screen layout To allow a consistent layout between various screen sizes and browsers, the database screens are resiz- able, which is another innovation implemented in the database design. This is accomplished using a mixture of CSS and JavaScript techniques. The mechanism used is simply having any and/or all objects on the HTML page at a relative ( per cent) size to the so-called containing element. On top of the cascading hierarchy is the ,html. element, almost immediately followed by the ,body. element. The ,html. element is set with a default text size and this is considered ‘100 per cent’ by the CSS. Therefore, by setting the ,body. tag dynamically to a percentage of the font size, the fonts on the screen automatically adjust, even when resizing the window after the document is loaded. Furthermore, images are also set to a percentage. Results Software implementation The ETHNOS v2.0 software has been selected as the basis for the development of several NEMDBs, which was one of the thematic priorities of the MEDGENET project. We opted to use a rather simplistic implementation, based on ﬂat-ﬁle data- bases, for two reasons. (1) The NEMDB ﬁeld was at that time in its infancy, so we felt that adopting a simple and user-friendly platform would attract more potential curators with limited computer lit- eracy to establish NEMDBs for their populations. (2) The resulting NEMDBs provide allele fre- quency information, calculated on the basis of summary- and not individual-level data. Using this software, ﬁve NEMDBs were generated. Table 1 outlines the main features of the NEMDBs that have been developed for the MEDGENET project. The Israeli NEMDB is a freely available online prototype database, which effectively integrates information on the heterogeneity of inherited 364 # HENRY STEWART PUBLICATIONS 1479–7364. HUMAN GENOMICS. VOL 4. NO 5. 361–368 JUNE 2010