[Gmod-help] new GMOD front page comments

[Don Gilbert]

Dave,

I think your work on Mock_GMOD_Home_Page is a good idea, the current one
isn't anything especially good.  Adding News is good.  I'd also like to seem
see more use of the wiki Categories to direct folks to general GMOD contents.

Please consider the "Popular GMOD Tools" category a moving target, e.g.,
consider the wiki Popular pages section for suggestions. For instance, I haven't
added GMOD Tools and Lucegene to this Popular Tools section as my own contributions
even though they apppear to be popular, and the SybBrowse tool at least appears to
be out of production and support, so might be demoted (maybe in favor of a category
showing the various synteny tools we learned of at last meeting).

Also the "About GMOD" section deserves thought and some revision. I think it
would be good for this to express some more of the range and focus of GMOD
concisely to attract more users.  Having the text list of organizations might be
retired as redundant with the following icon list, in favor of more summary
of GMOD's actual deliverable contents (and planned expansions).

Perhaps About along the lines of this (with less stodgy phrasing):

The Generic Model Organism Database project is an open source
project to develop a complete set of software for creating and
administering an organism database, or MOD. Components of this
project [GMOD_Components Category link] include genome 
visualization and editing tools,
literature curation tools, a robust database schema, biological
ontology tools, and a set of standard operating procedures. 

With participation from several database projects (see below),
GMOD develops tools for, and provides support for, many uses of
genome data from genes, gene expression, high throughput genome
wide analyses, with software tools for management, visualization,
analysis and community annotation of computational, experimental
and literature ends of genome information [?redundant w/ above]. 
New participating groups are welcome. Contributions of shared development effort
for new software and data management methods are expected in this
shared effort.  Prospective and current adopters of GMOD tools
should voice their needs and interests, as well as contribute
with software or methodology developed for their projects to aid
this collaboration.

This project is funded by the NIH and the USDA Agricultural Research
Service and National Science Foundation.



- Don Gilbert
-- d.gilbert--bioinformatics--indiana-u--bloomington-in-47405
-- gilbertd at indiana.edu--http://marmot.bio.indiana.edu/