NCSA SEMINAR, Mark Miller, Jan. 19

[Erna A Amerman]

Special NCSA Bioinformatics Seminar and Discussions

"The Biology Workbench: An enabling environment for biology teaching and
research."

Mark Miller
University of California at San Diego

Seminar : 2 pm, Thursday, January 19, 2006
1030 NCSA Building
1205 West Clark Street., Urbana

Also:  Open Discussion on the Biology Workbench as a Research 
Computational Environment: 10 am, 4000 NCSA Building
Open Discussion on the Biology Workbench as an Educational Environment: 
11:00 am, 4000 NCSA Building


Biomedical research has become increasingly dependent upon software and 
visualization tools to analyze gene and protein sequences. Providing a 
proper information technology support environment to analyze sequences 
and store the data produced is essential, but often presents a 
particular challenge to researchers who have conducting "wet lab" 
investigations as their main goal. At present, approximately 30,000 
researchers and students depend on the Biology Workbench 
(workbench.sdsc.edu) to meet their needs for sequence analysis software,

data storage, and data retrieval. The Biology Workbench provides users 
free access to web-based environment where users with only an internet 
browser can conduct analyses, access databases, and store their results.

Users have access to 80 sequence analysis functions and 33 remote 
databases of international significance, and a storage allocation for 
their personal data. The user base of the Biology Workbench has now 
grown larger than the original architecture of the Biology Workbench can

support, and its rate of growth remains constant. This presentation and 
discussions outline a methodology to refactor the existing Biology 
Workbench to create a more modular, more stable platform to meet the 
needs of Molecular Biologists for analytical tools, databases, and an 
area to store the results of their work. In its refactored form, the 
Next Generation Biology Workbench created under NIH  funding will remove

the limitation on number of users, create an easily expansible, reusable

structure into which community codes can be mounted. It will provide 
users access to all currently available Workbench tools, and a variety 
of new enabling technologies, including visualization tools, Web 
Services, a user configurable interface, peer-to-peer data sharing 
capabilities, and grid computing capabilities.

For inquiries about the scientific or technical content of the visit, 
please contact Dr. Miller's host, Eric Jakobsson, jake at ncsa.uiuc.edu, or

244-2896

If interested in joining Dr. Miller for lunch or dinner, please contact 
Beth McKown, bmckown at ncsa.uiuc.edu or 244-0078.  If possible, please 
respond re meals by 3 pm on Tuesday, especially for lunch.