[Biojava-l] BioInformatics toolbox.

[Muratet, Michael]

Greetings All

There is a tool like this for signal processing. Take a look at Khoros at
www-vis.lbl.gov. Its been a few years since I used it, but the principle
seems the same. The user can drag and drop icons to form analysis chains
that read, process, and output data. Of course, you still have to know
what's going on inside a Fourier transform, just as a biologist would have
to know what's going on inside a gene finder (for example) to make sense of
the results. But you don't have to code anything...

Regards,

Mike



> 
> My idea is this: provide an IDE that is geared towards 
> developing visual
> models of data sources. Parsers are associated with data 
> sources and all
> parsers can have data transformation filters attached to them which
> implement a basic renderable interface so permiting the data to be
> visualized. The IDE is plugin based in that additional 
> parsers, renderers
> and filters can be downloaded and plugged in. The filters 
> offer a means to
> transform the data through algorithmic means after it has 
> been parsed and
> before it hits any of the visualization components --so the 
> entire process
> from data aquisition to data transformation and visualization 
> works on a
> pipeline principle. This is a simple model which I believe 
> that biologists
> could get their heads around. The idea of 'pluggable' data 
> transformation
> algorithms shouldn't be too esoteric for them and it is a 
> small step from
> there towards getting the biologists to write their own 
> plugins. This is why
> I was looking at Eclipse.
> 
>