Collaborative projects require centralized databases and systematic methods for sharing data. A centralized Web site provides access to resources covering all aspects of C. elegans biology. Standardized data objects allow integration of data from many different labs in a consistent format. Since ACeDB is an object-oriented database, any object can contain links to other data objects. Notice that the Allele object can also point back to its corresponding Locus object.
Any lab can maintain a local ACeDB database, an submit objects as they generated from lab work.
Services for collaborators eg. Knowlege is built by constructing relations between different kinds of data. We can think of data as the raw material and knowledge as the value-added product. Relationships between different types of information, such as the Locus and Allele models described above, are themselves information. However, each gene and gene family contains automaticaly-generated links to related information in other databases.