The User Perspective Michelle Osmond

The Research Challenge Molecular biology, biochemistry, plant biology, genetics, toxicology, chemistry, and more. A global company with primary research sites in the US, UK, Switzerland, and France. Windber Research Institute: A Web Portal for Translational Medicine Provide a web based research environment suitable for a broad community of clinicians and biomedical informaticians Collaboration between a number of geographically separated research institutions and medical centers 30+ users at 3+ different sites We work to improve plants and how they are used

Expectations of e-Research Data electronically gathered for several years Need a data analysis tool targeted specifically for a clinical research community We are a technology company: aware of possibilities The community is in many ways still in the process of transitioning to a modern IT infrastructure Familiar with technology and already using

Functional & Non-Functional Requirements Administration Computational Data sharing and integration –Complex data structure Workflow –“plug and play” informatics environment –Dynamic, iterative process –Flexible, cross-domain work Visualisation Collaboration tools Administration –Maintainable Computational –scalable Data sharing and integration Workflow –Dynamic, iterative process Visualisation Collaboration tools

Usability Requirements Two different types of users: Biomedical informatics staff: –Powerful analytical tool that can offer them a high degree of flexibility in their research. Clinicians: –Intuitive web-based user interface –Minimal training required Ease of use Make complex tasks easy to specify: workflow deployment Ability to create portal services in- house Bug-free Error reporting and prevention could become very important Access to tools and resources –In-house tools/services –Data

Lessons Learnt – Portal Strengths Highly interactive High degree of flexibility in relation to other web based OLAP tools Design and build own workflows and deploy them to the portal –Flexibility - I have not found too many user requests that could not be solved with a portal tool. Ease of use

Lessons Learnt – Portal Weaknesses Lack of comprehensive security model –Data security, granularity Range of tools could be expanded Quality of content could be improved Creation and deployment of new workflows requires expertise and time. Deployment tool –Not nice GUI –Layout of services not customisable enough Reporting Error handling

Lessons Learnt – Portal Alternatives? Given our requirements, a thick client solution was never considered as an alternative There are some bioinformatics applications, in particular VectorNTI, that are used daily by our scientists. If their API can leverage web services well we could conceivably have a lot of users accessing tools through it.

Future Plans for the Portal A more advanced and expandable data model More data from other projects New web tools for exploring and visualising the patient data Develop and deploy more workflows

end