An integrative software system for biomedical information analysis workflow

Abstract

In recent years, explosive amount of biological data has been obtained and deposited in various databases. Accordingly, to analyze the biomedical information, many algorithms and computer programs have been developed. Since these programs are developed by commercial companies or academic institutes independently, the lack of common standard makes the talks between them difficult. In one integrative analysis, when several of them are needed, researchers are usually exhausted by the program switching and data transformation. In this paper, based on workflow, we developed an integrative software system for biomedical data analysis, namely System of Biomedical Workflow (SOBW). The system is a java-based software, which provides 1) a general application development interface to incorporate or bridge other programs and 2) a workflow mechanism to operate them and make them talk easily. At the moment, many programs to analyze the data from multiple electrodes are integrated. Because the interface developed is very general and flexible, new analysis tools can be incorporated easily as required. SOBW implies an ideal environment for integrative biomedical research.