Established in 1998, SPICE was a project funded by the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) to carry out fundamental research into a new robust and scaleable architecture for Species 2000.  The original project partners were Cardiff University , Southampton University , The University of Reading , Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and the Natural History Museum London .

Since then the SPICE project has developed the distributed computing engine that runs the Dynamic Checklist.  Then "wrapper" programmes allow a number of species databases to be queried simultaneously, returning a uniform list of results.

 

The conceptual basis of the SPICE distributed system rotates around the SPICE Common Data Model (CDM) described in various documents (CDM v1.20, CDM v1.21).  This specifies the SPICE Protocol by which the Common Access System (CAS) queries the array of connected databases, and the responses envisaged from these databases.  However, for precise clarification of which items have been implemented in the Species 2000 project please see i) Dynamic Checklist Instructions  ii) SPICE XML Schema. 

 

The current version of SPICE (4.1 March 2004) contains the following features:

Since version 4.1:

• Hierarchy support with demonstration interface
• Updated web service
• Hierarchy requests added
• Ability to choose between global and euro hubs
• Extended type 3 functionality (can get data for multiple hubs in one request)
• Caching system bug fixes 

Since version 4.0:

• External test module
• Tests both the CAS and wrappers
• CAS tester automatically restarts the CAS in the event of an error
• Wrapper test cases configurable via the www
• Tests automatically run at configurable times
• Automatic emailed test reports
• Runs as a windows service (automatically restarts when server is rebooted)
• Improved handling of unexpected wrapper responses
• Replacement of the “Availability agent” component
• New caching system
• All wrapper data cached
• Cache automatically updated when the wrapper reports GSD data updates 

Since version 3.x:

• CAS web service to provide programmatic access
• Support for CDM 1.20 (backward compatible with CDM 1.11)
• Global/European hub switch
• Web based wrapper configuration tool
• New simplified installation procedure
• CAS debugging application
• Improved logging system (including request login)

Main Features from previous versions:

• CDM 1.11 support
• Servlet based web interface
• CORBA architecture to provide scalability 

Papers about SPICE:
AC Jones, X Xu, N Pittas, WA Gray, NJ Fiddian, RJ White, JS Robinson, FA Bisby and SM Brandt, SPICE: Architecture for integrating autonomous databases to a distributed catalogue of Life.  Proc 11th Int. Conference and Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2000), Springer-Verlag (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), 10pp, September 2000.