OBJECTIVE: The contents of microbial information are complicated because of being hierarchical, duplicated as well as their changes are continuous and various. Much of time and cost are required for maintaining, expanding the information after representing them into a relational database. The relational database is not adequate to make the information sharable via Internet. In addition, user's meta-knowledge is insufficient to use the information via Internet and users may not be able to cope with the continuous changes of microbial information through the static web interface. Therefor, this study is conducted to develop an active microbial web database for resolving those problems.

METHODS: To solve these problems, object-oriented database, which was able to represent the complicated contents and knowledge, was used, and intelligent agents were implemented to cope with the continuous evolution of microbial information. Also, they were incorporated into user interface to assist users in an interactive environment, who want to use information via Internet.

RESULTS: The implemented system have shown advantages of solving difficulties arising from hierarchical and duplicated microbial data. It showed the possibility to share and manage the complex microbial data via Internet. It helped the system to be implemented as the active database, information stored in the object-oriented database.

CONCLUSION: This study indicates that a similar approach may lead to develop an expert system based on the web and active database, which is able to be evolved, and to develop intelligent interface, using the agent.