Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the community is welcome to share their negative results, which can save time
and resource and also provide cues for designing better experiments. For
computational projects, the Galaxy workfl ow engine is customized to provide
an easy user interface for creating workfl ows and sharing them with other
community members. The workfl ow itself and the results generated by running
the workfl ow are automatically extracted to open laboratory notebooks. A
version track mechanism exists for storing different versions of the same docu-
ment for ease of understanding the project plan and results at different time
points. A project management system is linked to each project and holds
information on the deliverables (tasks) on a scheduler. This system helps in
closely monitoring the projects. The overdue tasks are differently colored to
highlight bottlenecks in the system. Such tracking and monitoring systems are
crucial for online collaborations as all the participating members can access
and review the project status, discuss the issues, and get help from the com-
munity in resolving bottlenecks.
A drug discovery pipeline is full of failures and challenging bottlenecks. The
OSDD portal may help in bypassing at least some of these issues by providing
a common platform for communication among experts from different domains.
A cross-domain interaction may further the pace of scientifi c research. The
portal also serves as a means for faster communication as the documents or
data exist on a common sharable platform and hence are advantageous over
normal e - mail traffi c as the data exist on an online archive which is searchable.
It also helps in evading management overhead by providing PMS applications
closely interfaced with the projects and a versioning mechanism to keep track
of the document versions. In addition, it is also important to share results in
real time to make decisions on future experiments. The open laboratory note-
books may be used for sharing results and discussing the experiments.
Moreover, each project is also linked to the resources (chemicals, funds, staff-
ing, etc.), and this information is updated as when the resources are allocated
and utilized in the project.
The OSDD project has created open-access repositories for clones, proteins,
and small-molecule libraries. These resources are acquired, generated, or con-
tributed by the members of the OSDD community. These resources are also
listed for the community and can be readily accessed (http://oar.osdd.net/).
The key component of the OSDD portal is the semantic search, which is
based on Semantic Web technologies and uses the RDF data store to fi nd
relevant information. In this era of data deluge, it becomes a challenge to
generate knowledge from data. In order to make best use of available informa-
tion, it is imperative to organize and manage data in such a way that it may
be searched to answer questions than merely fi nding data for specifi c key-
words. This is the challenge of the Semantic Web and demands data in standard
ontology so that a search may encompass every possible resource and fi nd
answers to relevant questions. In the OSDD portal, users can create their own
query and fi nd relevant information on the data that exist on the portal as well
as data incorporated from third-party resources.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search