This is a stand-in for the EBI's top level public 'home page', which will be moved from mercury in due course (or a new version will be written). Once the contents of the mercury site have been moved here, the new contents of this page will be what people outside the EBI will see if they access the URL http://www.ebi.ac.uk/.
Until the mercury services and pages are moved here, this page is not actually externally visible. Some of the services under here, however, are already exernally visible, via aliased URLs such as http://edgp.ebi.ac.uk/edgp/, which maps to gin:/ebi/www/web/public/Research/EDGP/index.html
When we are ready to move the balance of the mercury web stuff here, we'll change the ownership and permissions on this page to suit whatever artisticly-inclined person will be maintaining it for the site.
The file hierarchy below this page is organized by 'programme'. So under gin:/ebi/www/web/public there are directories Research and Services. This matches the organization of the top level 'buttons' in the present home page. These names do not have to appear in URLs, as aliases can be used to hide them. Some changes will have to be made to the top level of the existing mercury archive to adjust for this new organization.