Each of the following people deserves special thanks for their contributions.
Victor McKusick, creator of Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM), on which OMIA is modelled, provided moral support from the very first time the possibility of OMIA was raised by Frank at the International Congress of Genetics in Moscow in 1978. Jan Graham spent three years from 1980, chasing up old references and entering them into a database on a mainframe computer. Steve Brown worked wonders on the mainframe and then in the relational database called Advanced Revelation (ARev), first on a desktop and then on Frank's laptop. Steve's software was in regular use for more than 20 years.
Carolyn Bucholtz, from ANGIS, took the flat file exported from ARev and worked her wonders in creating the original OMIA web page, populating it with the flat file behind the then OMIM birx search engine kindly provided by Dennis Benson and Randy Huntzinger from NCBI. Victor McKusick solved a pivotal problem that enabled the web page to be made public. Its birthdate is 26th May 1995. David Lipman, from NCBI, and staff from Johns Hopkins University (in particular Joanna Amberger) enabled reciprocal linking of OMIM with OMIA, which came into operation on 16th October 1997. Camson Huynh, from ANGIS, took over web responsibilities from Carolyn. Later, Dao Mai, also from ANGIS, wrote code for automatically replacing the flat file. Carolyn's web site was in constant use for almost 10 years. Paul le Tissier contributed much enthusiasm and many ideas during the development of the ARev database, and beyond.
At the request of the USDA's National Agricultural Library (NAL) in Washington, OMIA was made available to the NAL, who packaged it into ACeDB software, linked it with the Agricola bibliographic database and with OMIM, and made it available (on 16th August, 1995) on the home page of USDA's Agricultural Genomic Information Server. Gail Juvik, Stephen M. Beckstrom-Sternberg and Jon T. Krainak were the enthusiastic drivers of this initiative, which continued until the NAL's genomics databases were transferred to Cornell University at the end of 1999. Maria Nemchuk continued the operation at Cornell, until it, too, was decommissioned in 2002.
In 2002, Paul McGreevy, a colleague in the Faculty of Veterinary Science at the University of Sydney, organised an assessment exercise for first-year Veterinary Science students to prepare text entries for some of the clinical fields (in lay terms) that had laid blank for so long, in relation to inherited disorders of dogs. Because OMIA then still resided on a laptop, it was not possible to add the student's text to the OMIA fields. Instead, a separate database called Listing of Inherited Disorders in Animals (LIDA) was created by a team comprising Paul McGreevy, Federico Costa, Paul Della Torre, Peter Thomson and Frank. This database also contains lists of breeds affected by each disorder, obtained from the web site of the Association of Veterinarians for Animal Rights. The plan is to expand LIDA to become a means for collecting, analysing and presenting real-time genetic epidemiology data on the incidence of inherited disorders in various animal species.
Early in 2004, Mike Poidinger, then Head of ANGIS, generously took all the tables exported from the ARev database on Frank's laptop and placed them in a new MySQL database on an ANGIS server. He also picked up the Medline URLs for thousands of references. Johann Lenffer took Mike's creation and, under the guidance of Mike and Shoba Ranganathan (Biotechnology Research Institute, Macquarie University), developed it into a database with interactive web page that was ready for beta-testing. Late in 2004, Kao Castle took over from Johann, bringing the database and new web page to the stage where Carolyn's original web page could be retired.
Early in 2005, Matthew Mailman from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) expressed interest in linking OMIA to a phenotype database under development at NCBI. This has proved to be the beginning of a very fruitful collaboration, culminating a mirror of OMIA being hosted at NCBI as an Entrez database. Matt deserves special thanks for all his efforts in bringing this development to fruition, as does Kao Castle for working closely with Matt, albeit across the Pacific Ocean.
In August 2005, substantial help was also received from Stefan Gregory, a programmer in ANGIS; from Johann, who rejoined the team again after completing his honours research project; and from Arjun Rao, a medical practitioner who, in addition to providing several enhancements, put his clinical knowledge to very good use in mapping OMIA entries to the Mammalian Phenotype Ontology, and expanding the capacity of the Ontology.
With all the help outlined above, by mid-September 2005 we reached the stage where Carolyn's original web page could be retired, and the two new versions of OMIA - the new ANGIS interface and the NCBI Entrez mirror - were launched.
Imke Tammen and Yizhou Chen are amongst several colleagues and students who have contributed ideas and text; each contributor is acknowledged in the entry to which they have contributed.
Omia owes it's current incarnation to all of the above, aswell as the ongoing efforts of the following people/groups (click here for contact details, or refer to the organisation websites in the banner at the bottom of the page):
- Professor Frank Nicholas (University of Sydney)
- Frank tirelessly continues to Curate omia, personally updating the data from endless literature searches, liaising with other experts and generally providing the driving force and inspiration behind OMIA.
- Jonathan Usmar (SheepGenomics)
- Jonathan runs the technical side of OMIA - enhancing the interface, database and other systems in an attempt to improve the system for the Australian and New Zealand sheep industries. Despite numerous sheep-specific features an inevitable byproduct of this work is improvement of the system for everyone.
- Oscar Luo (SheepGenomics) & Dao Mai (ANGIS)
- ANGIS has generously hosted OMIA for us for some time now, and shortly OMIA will be migrating to a faster SheepGenomics server currently being prepared by Oscar with Dao's help (as the server's going to live at ANGIS). Further into the future OMIA will be migrating again to an even faster ANGIS server. Oscar Luo is currently setting up a new server for SheepGenomics (with help from Dao Mai at ANGIS), which once operational will host OMIA until a new ANGIS server (one not owned by SheepGenomics) becomes available.
