About MedPhyt®

MEDPHYT® is a new database for plants of medicinal interest. The basic project and further extensions will be funded by the Beilstein Institute (Frankfurt/Main, Germany) and development will be the joint responsibility of the Beilstein Institute in collaboration with the Institute for Information Technology at the University of Klagenfurt (Austria). Data obtained under license from Dr. Thomas Schoepke (University of Greifswald, Germany) has been augmented with material from other data collections by the Beilstein Institute, whilst external academic groups will input data drawn from past and current literature sources. 

Initially, MEDPHYT® will collect data about any European plant of medicinal and pharmaceutical interest (plants from other continents will be added at a later date) and offer this data on the Internet. English and German versions will be available. Thus data collection will yield 600 individual data records: one record for each plant species. In the initial phase there will be 75 data fields for each species, thus MEDPHYT® will provide 45,000 structured entries in both languages. All available web technologies will be used to illustrate biochemical facts and metabolic pathways. Central to the concept is the linking of pharmaceutical effects and chemical facts to history, biochemistry, pharmacology and toxicology etc.

The data bank system can be described as an n-tier system consisting of database, web server with integrated user administration and the user. In comparison to other current data collections available on the world wide web, which are invariably text files (monographs), MEDPHYT® is a relational database system. This has the advantage of allowing data base enquiries for all relevant data fields. In addition, MEDPHYT® provides a series of ready to use functions for the graphical presentation of chemical, biochemical, and pharmacological processes for both research and teaching purposes. We intend to add other features during subsequent development stages.

Long runnung project: March 2003- April 2007

Members:
A.o. Univ.-Prof. Dr. Harald Kosch (Project Leader)
Dr. Carsten Kettner (Co-Leader)
DI Gisela Blaschke
DI Margit Lang
Erich Teppan  
Janine Lachner, Doris Oborny
Gerd Oberlechner, Martin Santner und Julius Köpke 

Reference Publication (access to files):
Carsten Kettner, Harald Kosch, Margit Lang, Janine Lachner, Doris Oborny and Erich Teppan.
Creating a Medicinal Plant Database
In Proceedings of the Workshop on Database Issues in Biological Databases (DBiBD) in conjunction with the Tenth International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT), January 2005, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Technical Information

Online Version