Project milestones

June 1997 -- initial discussions between Y Ugawa and D Gilbert about Internet 2 uses for biosequence data between USA and Japan.
August 1997 -- "Development of Mirror Server by using High Speed Data Transfer in Genome Science" proposed by Y Ugawa to APAN organization. See http://www.jp.apan.net/HPIIS-Applications/JP-AFFRC
February 1998 -- APAN Singapore link with APAN Japan established.
April 1998 -- an expanded Bio-Mirrors project, by A Mizushima and Y Ugawa, approved by APBioNet.
May 1998 -- APAN resource allocation secretariat approved the resource allocation which A Mizushima and Tan Tin Wee applied for through APBioNet.
June 1998 -- Bio-Mirrors project approved by APAN.
September 1998 -- Transpac link to APAN Japan established.
December 1998 -- Initial mirroring between bio-mirror.jp.apan.net and bio-mirror.us.apan.net, including GenBank, EMBL, and protein data.
January 1999 -- Australian site bio-mirror.au.apan.net joins;DDBJ databank added.
March 1999 -- TransPAC, the international connection between the vBNS and APAN is operational at 70 Mbps.
April 1999 -- Singapore site bio-mirror.sg.apan.net joins.
2000 -- Korea site bio-mirror.kr.apan.net joins.-- China site bio-mirror.im.ac.cn joins.
2001 -- Thailand site bio-mirror.ku.ac.th joins.-- Malaysia site bio-mirror.my.apan.net joins.
2004 -- New Zealand site biomirror.org.nz joins.

Addendum

Commercial use restrictions on SWISS-PROT and PROSITE:
Publishers of the SWISS-PROT and PROSITE data sets ask that all commercial users participate in the funding of these important data by paying a license fee. No fee is charged to academic users.
Please refer to these announcements for details: http://www.expasy.ch/announce/