[Bioperl-l] BOF

[Hilmar Lapp]

Jason Stajich wrote:
> - Better out of the box support.
> 
>   Perhaps common functions/uses should be combined
>   into a suite or an organized program that allows a user to
>   do things from our list of common bioperl uses.  This provides a user
>   with little computer background the ability to jump in and start doing
>   simple things.
> 

I dare to comment even though I won't attend the Thursday evening event
:)

Yes, I agree. Has anyone of you seen e.g. the Khoros workspace for image
and data analysis? For those who haven't, Khoros (www.khoral.com) is a
package of a whole bunch of modules (libraries) and programs for various
tasks in image (and, more general, data matrix) analysis. The nice thing
is the visual programming workspace that is included, which allows you to
visually place 'modules' (actually programs) on a GUI canvas and
interconnect their in/outputs, along with setting arguments (via a GUI!).
This way, even someone without programming knowledge can quickly get away
with applying a set of operators to an image, and visualizing the result.
Those skilled in the art can quickly try out new algorithms.

I guess (I even know) that there are other visual programming tools
implementing such a concept, too. But I'm not aware of such a tool in
Bioinformatics, or sequence analysis, to be more precisely, which may due
to the fact that I haven't really looked for one. I seem to recall that I
once saw a generic tool that could do the job here, but I don't know
where. Has anyone seen such a beast, or does anyone else think it would
be useful?

Maybe this is even completely off topic.

	Hilmar
-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Hilmar Lapp                                email: hlapp@gmx.net
NFI Vienna, IFD/Bioinformatics             phone: +43 1 86634 631
A-1235 Vienna                                fax: +43 1 86634 727
-----------------------------------------------------------------