The goal of WCS was to capture all the knowledge of the community of molecular biologists who study the nematode worm C. elegans. This organism became the model for the Human Genome Project during the course of the WCS project and the WCS software inspired many of the features of the genome databases for the worm (circa 1991) and other organisms. The head of the worm sequencing project (John Sulston) acknowledged the pioneering technology of WCS in the early days and sent his lead informaticians to study it. Some 50 worm laboratories around the world used the prototype across the course of the project.

As we enter the era of functional genomics with interactive databases across the Net, WCS still serves as the only large-scale model of the comprehensive analysis environments to come. The functionality predicted in the Plenary Lecture at the Keck Symposium on Computational Biology in 1993 (by PI Schatz) will soon be routinely available to every biology lab.

WCS encoded the full range of knowledge, formal and informal, literature and data -- within a tightly linked information space. Searches could be done across all the sources, including journal articles and community newsletters, and navigations could be done across all the links, including literature articles, genes and clones, physical maps, and anatomical and developmental databases. Multiple interactive media types were supported within an integrated search and navigation system. A user manual for v2 can be found online. A summary of WCS was featured in "Methods in Cell Biology", vol.48.

The system was completely symmetric, so that any data type which could be retrieved could also be composed and added to the information space. Examples of collaboration occurred on an experimental basis, where users at one site added a gene, then users at other sites around the world commented on its functionality the same day. This was striking functionality for 1993 and in fact WCS was the other system seriously considered as the underlying infrastructure for NCSA Mosaic, before the more mature WWW was chosen and the Web was born. (PI Schatz was the scientific advisor at NCSA for information systems both before and after the Mosiac development.)

Many communities were interested in the WCS technology and it was used as the concrete example for selling the Human Brain Project. A prototype directly using WCS technology was developed in neuroscience. The Psychiatric Postmortem Community System (PPCS) was a joint proposal with Stanley Watson (University of Michigan), Clifford Saper (Harvard Medical School), and Thomas Huang (Beckman Institute) to design a prototype distributed neuroscience electronic information system. The proposal received high marks from NIH but was considered too risky at the time.

After Mosaic became widely used, it became possible to implement the retrieval functionality within web browsers and make the software widely available. The ENQUire system performed on-the-fly federation to search remote databases worldwide and interactively navigate links. It was the direct predecessor of the Biology Workbench at NCSA -- the first version of the Workbench used the ENQUire software and was implemented by a postdoc working on WCS, on loan to the Computational Biology group at NCSA. The Biology Workbench later became the centerpiece of the Biology Applications Team for Molecular Biology for the NCSA PACI Alliance and the model for the other Applications Teams.

WCS also served as the bridge between the major global information infrastructure projects of CANIS. The first version of WCS, used to sell the NSF proposal, was based on the Telesophy prototype. The ideas behind WCS later were used to build a generic community system, which became the underlying architecture for the Interspace prototype. 

For more information see the PUBLICATIONS pertaining to the Worm Community System.