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Goals and Motivation

frasator edited this page Oct 11, 2016 · 1 revision

  • [Why CellMaps](Goals and Motivation#why-cellmaps)
  • [Goals](Goals and Motivation#goals)

Why CellMaps

Most modern applications are being developed following the new cloud paradigm. Typical desktop applications lack of many interesting features that new technologies can offer. CellMaps has been developed following this new paradigm, data and analysis lies in the cloud, meanwhile client application runs in the web browser.

This approach has some benefits when compared to other desktop solutions like Cytoscape: users are always updated and no local installation is needed, they can save session in the cloud and open in any other computer or mobile device, users can share data and work collaboratively. Also, is very easy to integrate CellMaps in a web page, everything is run in a remote server o cloud so users must not worry about high CPU analysis, ...

Goals

CellMaps has been designed with these goals in mind:

  • 100% web-based using open standards such as HTML5 and SVG. No plugins or other technologies such as Flash or Java Applets are needed
  • to provide an user account registration that allow researchers to save their networks and analysis in the cloud, therefore data and analysis are available anywhere
  • some analysis can make an exhaustive use of CPU so all analysis are run in remote servers using a queue
  • to develop an application for modern mobile devices like tablets
  • to easily integrate and create biological networks, this is achieved by consuming CellBase web services which contain most relevant biological information such as Ensembl core, Reactome, IntAct, Uniprot, miRNAs, TFBS, mutations, ...
  • allow researchers to load attributes data for nodes and edges, thus users can filter and select part of the networks
  • to provide an analysis plugin framework that will allow researchers to develop and integrate new analysis
  • to provide to the community with a web-based, open and embeddable solution to visualize biological networks, so researchers can focus in their analysis and methodologies
  • to license the code as GPLv2 and open the source code to the community through a Gitorius server