An information management system for collaboration within distributed working environment

Abstract

Over a period of several years we apply the systems biology approach to investigate the dynamic regulatory mechanisms controlling the expression of segmentation genes in Drosophila embryo. Due to ongoing data acquisition, development of new processing and analysis methods, as well as modification and improvement of old ones serious problems arose with data and workflows management. Different geographical location of research groups poses additional difficulties. To solve these problems we have developed an information management system using multiagent and REST architectures. This system is easily extendable to deal with new data processing and analysis methods, flexible in specification and modification of these methods, scalable and supports distributed processing and analysis of data. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.