Evolving a legacy system: restructuring the Mendelian Inheritance in Man database.

Mendelian Inheritance in Man (MIM) is an encyclopedia of medical genetics that has been in electronic form for over 30 years. In its lifetime, MIM has undergone many organizational and software changes. In 1994, a major transition was made based on three basic principles: industry standards, open systems architecture, and extensibility. The resulting MIM database allows users to navigate to other genomic databases, permits the delivery of multimedia information, and improves the quality of data. The new MIM database also improved its administration because of 1) an internal format that enforces consistency; 2) a lower maintenance cost of software; and 3) a better ability to migrate MIM content. In addition, the new architecture will allow MIM easily to adopt emergent technologies as they mature.