|
EBI takes part in bioWidget Consortium
EBI became actively involved in the bioWidget Consortium, a multi-institutional group with partners from academia and industry whose mission is to provide high quality, reusable software componentry (or widgets) of benefit to the bioinformatics community. Focussing on graphical displays of genomic (or other biology-related) data, the bioWidget Consortium aims to remove the need to either build a customised application from scratch, or to invest in modifying someone else's application to do the things that are required. Building new, customised graphical displays using the bioWidgets should save a lot of work.
To make all of this really work, strict guidelines have been set up for the development of widgets (i.e. 'good programming practices'/software engineering) with regard to required components, testing and validation, quality control and end-user documentation. At the beginning of March 1997, two bioWidgets have their own homepages: DnaDisplay (tested) and a Hyperbolic Viewer (in testing phase).
At EBI, a phylogenetic tree viewer has been written using Sun Neo and SyBase which allows query and browsing of phylogenetic data on a remote server using CORBA, using a hyperbolic projection to display the resulting tree. The application exemplifies reusable componentry and distributed object technology. The separate widgets used in it have been submitted to the bioWidget Consortium for reuse.
The phylogenetic tree viewer (http://sunny.ebi.ac.uk/EBI/BioWidget/index.html) can be tried by anyone using a browser which support Java applets.
Compiled by: Research and Development
Resources and further information:
BioWidget Consortium Home Page
http://goodman.jax.org/projects/biowidgets/
DnaDisplay widget
http://goodman.jax.org/projects/biowidgets/DnaDispla y/
Hyperbolic Viewer widget
http://goodman.jax.org/projects/biowidgets/Hyperboli cViewer/
Hyperbolic Viewer information at EBI
Various demos
http://industry.ebi.ac.uk/~alan/BioWidget/
displaying NCBI taxonomic tree using CORBA to query the database
http://sunny.ebi.ac.uk/EBI/BioWidget/index.html
External sites are not endorsed by EMBL-EBI |
