Front-ends to Biomedical Data Analysis on Grids

Abstract

The e-infrastructure for bioscience (e-BioInfra) is a platform integrating various services and middleware to facilitate access to grid resources for biomedical researchers at the Academic Medical Center of the University of Amsterdam. In the past six years the user interfaces with the e-BioInfra have evolved from command-line interfaces to a Java desktop application, and later to an easy-to-use web application for selected biomedical data analysis. This evolution represents improvements to accommodate the requirements of a broader range of biomedical researchers and applications. In this paper we present the current user interfaces and analyse their usage considering the typical biomedical data analysis on the e-BioInfra, the roles assumed by the users in the various phases of data analysis life-cycle, and the user profiles. We observe that in order to support a wide spectrum of user profiles, with different expertise and requirements, a platform must offer a variety of user interfaces addressed to each user profile.