Interactive data visualization is a crucial tool in bioinformatics, allowing scientists to manage the otherwise-over-whelming amounts of data being generated by large scale efforts like the Human Genome Project and by other similar endeavors. From the locations of disease genes and the DNA sequences of various organisms to the expression profiles of genes active in different tissues and cell types, many different kinds of interrelated data must be processed, filtered, and finally presented to individual researchers.
Component-based software has been touted as the latest revolution in software engineering and , in the bioWidget project at the Center for Bioinformatics, computer scientists and biologists are working to apply this new design approach to the closely-intertwined problems of visualizing and analyzing biological data. The end result of this project, the bioWidget Toolkit, is a library of reusable software components with which programmers can rapidly assemble and customize applications for specific tasks.
Each of the bioWidgets provides a highly-configurable graphical representation of a particular kind of biological data and the remaining components of the Toolkit handle such tasks accessing databases and integrating external analysis tools and algorithms. The Toolkit promotes a "plug-and-play" approach to software design, allowing application designers to prototype new ways of visualizing and analyzing data sets without having to start from scratch each time. Such flexibility is important in an area in which scientists' evolving understanding of the underlying biological principles is driving equally rapid innovation in experimental techniques--and hence the kinds of data available for subsequent analysis.
For more information, please contact G. Christian Overton, Ph.D., Director; or visit The Center for Bioinformatics home page.
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