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| System Associates to Develop New HPA Culture Collections Website System Associates has won a contract to provide integrated web services for the Health Protection Agency (HPA). The HPA is tasked with protecting public health and preventing the spread of infectious diseases by providing support and advice to various interested bodies including the NHS, emergency services and the Department of Health. A vital part of HPA's work involves the provision and maintenance of four major culture collections. These collections include more than 45,000 cell cultures, bacterial cultures, fungal strains and viruses, most of which are available for worldwide sale and distribution for biological, medical and veterinary research. The contract with System Associates will bring about the integration of the four culture collections into a single, convenient to use website. For the first time products and services provided by all four collections will be available for purchase via an online, secure ordering and payment service. System Associates has designed a new look for the integrated website and will also provide a bespoke content management system and search-engine functionality to be powered by the company's g-Suite range of web products. In addition, the contract includes the provision of graphic design, 24-hour hosting, managed services, consultancy and bespoke application development. The existing culture collection databases will be integrated into a single web address, www.hpacultures.org.uk with site content powered by g-Serve, System Associates' content management framework. g-Serve will provide authorised HPA users with powerful, easy to use facilities for managing page content, updating culture listings, processing orders and improving search rankings. Users of the new CMS will also benefit from g-Media software features that allow them to add items to existing databases, create new collections and store and retrieve text and images in a variety of formats. To ensure consistent retrieval, System Associates will provide a bespoke search facility developed around g-Seek, an open source Java application based on the Lucene search engine. g-Seek has been developed to work with public sector best practice metadata standards, whilst remaining sufficiently flexible to index sites that do not adhere to these standards. System Associates' 24-hour hosting services will use a mirrored solution to support the large volume of web pages on the site, and will also include, support and managed services. write your comments about the article :: © 2008 Computing News :: home page |