Elements of the relevant signal transduction pathways like hormones, receptors, enzymes and transcription factors are persistently stored together with information about their interaction and references in an object-oriented database. Objects provide a natural way to represent those elements as data. Interactions are modeled as reactant and produce collections of the signal components or as activation and inhibition pointers, to enable the system to be used as the basis for simulation later on. Queries to the database can be conducted via the Internet by submitting names of transcription factors or signaling molecules. Queries concerning the single elements of which those pathways are composed are also possible and return an information page.
All information is validated with references to the original publications.
Overview over contextual constraints for each field of the database objects is given in the documentattion for the object.