User-centric annotation management for biological data

Abstract

Annotations play an increasingly crucial role in scientific exploration and discovery, as the amount of data and the level of collaboration among scientists increases. Although all such systems are implemented to take user input (i.e., the annotations themselves), very few systems are user-centric, taking into account user preferences on how annotations should propagate and be applied over data. In this paper, we propose to treat annotations as first-class citizens for biological data management by presenting a user-centric, view-based annotation framework, called ViP. Under the ViP framework we consider user preferences over the time semantics of annotations (by supporting future annotations) and over the network semantics of annotations (by supporting both implicitly-defined and explicitly-defined annotation propagation paths). In addition to novel functionality, we describe a novel caching technique which enables ViP to outperform the state of the art. We also propose to demonstrate our prototype implementation of the ViP framework. As part of the demo, we propose on the one hand to highlight the user-interface/functionality of our system and on the other hand to visualize the server/behind-the-scenes aspect.