NCLEVER- Network Command line Entrez
------------------------------------

What is it?
~~~~~~~~~~~

NClever is a character-based version of NCBI's Entrez program. It is an
interactive tool that allows easy browsing of the Entrez database.

  Entrez is:

     "a molecular sequence retrieval system developed at the
     National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a division of
     the National Library of Medicine (NLM).  Entrez provides an integrated
     approach for gaining access to nucleotide and protein sequence
     information, to the MEDLINE citations in which the sequences were
     published, and to a sequence-associated subset of MEDLINE.The sequence
     records are derived from a variety of database sources, including
     GenBank, EMBL, DDBJ, PIR, SWISS-PROT, PRF, and PDB.  With Entrez and a
     personal computer, you can rapidly search several hundred megabytes of
     sequence and literature data using techniques that are fast and
     intuitive."
             - Entrez User's Guide.

The original Entrez program written by NCBI is a tool that uses
windows, menus, and a pointing device; since not everyone
has computers or terminals with graphics capabilities, NClever was
written to do the same work using only text input/output.

In addition, the NClever program permits BATCH access to the Entrez
databases. Thus by use of script files, NClever can be made to perform
queries in batch mode.  In this way NClever can be used as a "search
engine" for any application which has as its input a set of database
queries in NClever format and can use as output any of the data in the
Entrez databases (in any of the various formats supported by Entrez).

Platforms/Operating Systems
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

NClever should run on any hardware/operating system combination that
are supported by the NCBI toolkit (for more information on the NCBI
toolkit, send an email to toolbox@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov; for more information
on Entrez, send mail to entrez@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov).  Presently this includes
(from the README file supplied with the toolkit):

		* IBM 370
		* SUN (SunOS & Solaris)
		* DEC Alpha under OSF/1
		* DEC Alpha under AXP/OpenVMS
		* Macintosh A/UX
		* Microsoft Windows
		* DOS
		* CenterLine CodeCenter
		* Cray
		* Convex
		* Hewlett Packard
		* NeXT
		* IBM RS 6000
		* Silicon Graphics
		* ULTRIX
		* VAX/VMS

(This information was current as of 1994 and may well be obsolete by now)

Note that we have only tested it on a Solaris platform.
    

Obtaining NClever
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  NClever can be obtained by anonymous FTP to:

	ftp://megasun.bch.umontreal.ca/pub/nclever


Installing NClever
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Please read the "INSTALLATION" file in the distribution.


Citing NClever
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
Rioux, P.A., Gilbert, W.A. and Littlejohn, T.G. (1994)
A Portable Search Engine and Browser for the Entrez Database.
J. Comp. Biol. 1(4): 293-295


Further Information
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For more information about the NClever project, send email to the
Informatics Division of the Organelle Genome Megasequencing Unit
at the Universite de Montreal:

	ogmp@bch.umontreal.ca

All feedback welcome.


Credits
~~~~~~~

This software was written by Pierre Rioux of the OGMP (Organelle
Genome Megasequencing Project), Departement de Biochimie, Universite
de Montreal (riouxp@bch.umontreal.ca) and William A. Gilbert, of
the University of New Hampshire (gilbert@unh.edu) under the management of
Tim Littlejohn, OGMP, Departement de Biochimie, Universite de Montreal
(tim@bch.umontreal.ca). Please send any comments/correspondence to
ogmp@bch.umontreal.ca. Thanks also to Jonathan Kans and Jonathan Epstein
at NCBI for providing lots of support during the development and
maintenance of the program, in the past 5 years.
      
The development of NClever was supported by a grant from the Canadian
Genome Analysis and Technology Program (CGAT). [Now defunct, alas]
