Figure 1.
BioMart Portal architecture. The BioMart Portal can be deployed in either of two different types of server architectures. In the ‘master/slave’-like architecture (A) each ‘slave’ server only provides access to its own local data, while the ‘master’ server acts as a portal presenting a unified view over data residing on all the ‘slave’ servers. In the ‘peer-to-peer’-like architecture (B) each server not only provides data access to its own data source, but also data from all other servers. In this way, every server acts as a data portal providing access to all the data.