Homogenizing access to highly time-consuming biomedical applications through a web-based interface

Abstract

The exponential increment in the production of biomedical data is forcing a higher level of automatization to analyze it. Therefore, biomedical researchers have to entrust bioinformaticians to develop software able to process a huge amount of data on high performance unix-based servers. However, most of the software is developed with a very basic, text-based, user interface, usually because of a lack of time. In addition the applications are developed as independent tools yielding to a set of specific software tools with very different ways of use. This implies that final users continuously need developer support. Even worse, in many situations only developers themselves are able to run the software every time is required. In this contribution we present a Web-based user interface that homogenizes the way users interact with the applications installed in a server. This way, authorized users can add their applications to the Web site at a very low cost. Therefore, researchers with no special computational skills will perform analysis by themselves, gaining independence to run applications whenever they want at the cost of a very little effort. The application is portable to any unix-like system with a php+mysql server. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.