By matija.obreza@croptrust.org
22 October 2015

We have received reports of differences in accession-level data from Vavilov institute (RUS001) on Genesys, EURISCO database and in VIRDB database. The difference in numbers was significant: EURISCO contained 123,430 accession records from VIR, VIRDB contained 230,000 and Genesys reported over 330,000 records from the Vavilov Research Institute.

Our database contained VIR records that are not registered in the current EURISCO database. These records had “VIR” as a prefix of the accession number. The records were added to the Genesys database before 2013 and we were unable to track down the original source of data. We have removed the conflicting records from the active Genesys database and have obtained a dataset matching EURISCO data.

Genesys features Universally Unique Identifiers (UUID) for accession records and makes records accessible through Permanent URLs using PURL.org service. The archived records remain resolvable and accessing the PURLs of archived records will return the archived data. One example is accession record VIR100000053: https://purl.org/germplasm/id/b41778b1-a8be-4eb2-9e4e-b02014281ab6

Future updates of VIR data will generate proper records in Genesys. With this action, we have moved 217,178 accession records with “VIR” prefix to the Genesys archive and they are no longer listed in the active database.