Problem

A cutting-edge bioinformatics company wanted to created a next-generation sequence analysis and visualization application to replace an older product. The new application would be useful for both modeling and gene functional analysis. It would make full use of analysis servers across the Internet to automate sequence analysis needs and filter for meaningful results. The results would be summarized as graphical annotations on the sequence alignment, in a form that can be conveniently browsed, analyzed further, saved, and even published as web pages or presentations.

Solution

Based on their requirements, this company decided to work with Nouveau Systems to design the new version of the application around the Nouveau Alliance Collaboration Platform and application framework. Key features that influenced their decision were:

Information modeling. The application required a unified data representation to integrate and organize all of its information. The Nouveau Alliance Collaboration Platform includes an advanced modeling capability that also enables applications to organize information into basic structures, such as lists, sets, trees, tables, maps, and graphs, as well as application-defined organizers that meet its specific requirements. The Nouveau Alliance Collaboration Platform's modeling capabilities provided the flexible modeling framework that met this application's requirements.

Annotations. The application stores the results of sequence analysis as annotations on the sequence alignment. The Nouveau Alliance Collaboration Platform provides a powerful annotation capability for adding annotations to managed objects. It also allows applications to define entirely new annotation types, including active annotations that operate on their target objects. The Nouveau Alliance Collaboration Platform provided the annoation capabilies required by this application, with little or no additional development.

Collaboration. The new application was to support collaborative discovery and analysis by multiple scientists. The Nouveau Alliance Collaboration Platform provides full collaboration capabilities, including real-time collaboration, multiple views, presence management, and user identity. The collaboration features of the Nouveau Alliance Collaboration Platform made it possible to design in advanced collaboration capabilities without significant additional design or development effort.

Application framework. The application would include a rich client GUI, with the ability to present user-defined views of data, and to support both real-time and off-line collaboration. The Nouveau Alliance Collaboration Platform's application framework provides definable application look and feels, user-managed views, and support for both real-time and off-line collaboration for rich client applications. Using the application framework greatly simplified the design of the application rich client, while providing features that would be difficult to implement using other technologies.

Results

Working with Nouveau Systems, this leading-edge bioinformatics company designed a next-generation genomics application around the Nouveau Alliance Collaboration Platform and application framework, with more advanced functionality and a simpler architecture, and requiring fewer resources to implement than with other collaboration platforms.