xDATA SoftDev
Development of ad-hoc personalized sotware to allow big-data cross- referencing from different sources
Case study
xDATA SoftDev
Development of ad-hoc personalized sotware to allow big-data cross-referencing from different sources
Background
For a scientific discovery to reach the market it needs to be made accessible to the end user in a quick and user-friendly way: thanks to our scientific software development team, BIOASTER can develop web applications tailored to the life sciences research environment.
Challenges
For their everyday work, scientists of one of BIOASTER’s partners must cross-reference several public biological data repositories with each other, and with their own experimental results.
Formal metadata schema structures rarely exist between different data sources/repository and these data extraction and consolidation actions are mostly manual making these steps laborious, time-consuming and a source of human errors.
Solution
The solution implemented for this use case was to centralize all the data needed for the partner’s research in one place in a “one-stop-shop” approach. The partner’s scientists would be able to access the data, query it and use it as often as necessary and as easily as possible.
Results
First, BIOASTER’s development team defined a database architecture able to receive all known data from various reference repositories, as well as data produced in the partner’s laboratories. BIOASTER then developed powerful ETL scripts to populate this ‘master database’ by fetching information directly from the source repositories.
The following step was to connect the master database to an in-house web application, enabling biologists to interact directly with the data, through an effective search engine associated with an efficient and intuitive interface.
The scientific application developed by BIOASTER offered quick-to-understand results, magnified by different data visualization tools. It also allowed
exporting these results easily for all other needs of the partner’s biologists and bioinformaticians.
Outlook
The partner now benefits from a fully functional tool, which can further upgrade, with or without the help of BIOASTER’s development team. In fact, we work according to best development practices, allowing our partner to fully master the web solution. The use of frameworks, languages and libraries supported by large communities and the test protocols provided enable any development team to continue improving this tool.