README

## miRMaid

MirMaid is data about microRNAs structured for easier access and integration, especially for computer-geeks

* The core of MirMaid is the data contained in miRBase, which is the de facto accepted standard registry for microRNA information and nomenclature.
* MirMaid takes miRbase data, reorganises it slightly and provides a programming interface to the data, which makes it much easier for the computer-savvy to perform complex data queries and analysis.
* MirMaid is extendable, meaning that additional data and functionality can easily be implemented as plugins.
* Although MirMaid also provides a basic web point-and-click-interface, the project focuses on the programmatic access to data.

A core feature of MirMaid is the many different but still intuitive and uniform access levels and representations of the data:

http://current.mirmaid.org/species/cel/matures          # HTML representation
http://current.mirmaid.org/species/cel/matures.xml      # XML representation
http://current.mirmaid.org/species/cel/matures.fa       # Fasta representation
Species.find_by_abbreviation('cel').matures             # Ruby object-relational model

Read more about miRMaid at www.mirmaid.org

## Copyright and redistribution

Copyright 2009, Anders Jacobsen, Morten Lindow

miRMaid is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.