[Bioperl-l] Request for advice and pointers on a project to help biologists d o simple formatting and analysis

[Stefan Kirov]

I like a lot this idea.
First my answer to your first 2 questions: no, no.
But I bet may biologists would scream in pain just hearing the word 
console (as you mentioned). So I offer 0 step (bait to learn a little UNIX).
Imagine a simple web form that is hooked to the perl interpreter (might 
be tricky from a security point, still it could be restricted in several 
ways) and does (amazingly) what the biologist types in. This would have 
to include file uploads/downloads as well. Of course the capabilities 
will be quite restricted, but the appetite comes with eating as some say 
and suddenly the console might be not a bad idea (thus Mac shares would 
go up :-) ).

Amir Karger wrote:

>Hi.
>
>I've gotten the impression - in my short time in bioinformatics - that
>biologists get very frustrated with data formatting and analysis tasks.
>Which is too bad, because many of these tasks are trivial for someone with a
>bit of Perl knowledge. Then again, we can't force them to learn Perl, even
>if it would be For Their Own Good.
>
>I was thinking it would be useful to have a toolkit of outrageously simple
>Perl one-liners.  Here's one:
>
>    # Merge two lists, removing duplicates (logical OR)
>    perl -ne '$seen{$_}++; END {print keys %seen}' file1 file2 > outfile
>
>A biologist (call her Sue) would look through a website containing a bunch
>of (searchable, categorized, etc.) scripts, cut & paste the Perl into Unix
>(from a website), then backspace over the filenames and type in their own
>filenames, and end up with something like this on the command line:
>
>myhost>perl -ne '$seen{$_}++; END {print keys %seen}' genes1 genes2 >
>all_genes
>
>The biologist hits return & voilà! Instant data munging!
>
>Of course, I'm not the first one to identify this problem or try to solve
>it.  But I think I'm working on a slightly different problem than previous
>solutions, and my (complete lack of) interface is different too.  Here's the
>"prior art" I've seen in this area, compared and contrasted with my idea.
>- EMBOSS et al.: solving harder bioinformatics problems; Interface is Unix
>executables
>- Bioperl's bioscripts: harder problems; Perl executables
>- Taverna / myGrid: fancy GUI interface (but I do think of my scripts as
>"shims")
>
>I'm really aiming for the lowest of low-hanging fruit here. I don't want
>scripts that run Blast or do fancy analysis. Rather, we'll have scripts like
>the above to merge lists, or get the standard deviation of column 7 of
>tabular data, or get the GenBank IDs of the top 10 hits from a BLAST output,
>or whatever. These are all tasks that're trivial in (Bio)Perl - and some you
>can even do in Excel - but most biologists won't know either Perl or fancy
>Excel.  Think of it as pipelining software for your vterm100.
>
>Why one-liners?
>- really, really fast development of new tools (especially compared with GUI
>tools)
>- no installation necessary, no dependencies (except Perl)
>- no download necessary; just cut and paste a tool from the web page
>- biologist doesn't need to learn an interface
>- if a biologist learns just a bit of Perl, they can tweak the one-liners:
>much easier than writing from scratch, but makes tools much more flexible
>- take advantage of existing tools' APIs: perl -MBio::Perl -e '...'
>
>Potential problems:
>- psychological barrier to using command line (I figure I'll aim first at
>the Unix-aware subset of biologists first, and leave complete World
>Domination to Phase 2.)
>- we can't fit error-handling into one-liners. Caveat scriptor
>
>So my questions for you bioperlers (finally!):
>- Are there other projects that have tried to solve this niche of problems
>i.e., allowing biologists to do simple formatting & analysis of biological
>or tabular data?
>- Are there at least discussions of this issue that I could read somewhere
>for ideas (e.g., bioperl-l archive)?
>- Does anyone have any free advice (positive or negative or both) to offer
>for this project?
>- Are there any other lists I should post these questions to?
>
>The working name for my toolbox of bio scripts is "Scriptome".  If it ever
>gets off the ground (and anyone cares), I'll post more info about it, along
>with a request for more advice, I'm sure.  
>
>Thanks,
>-Amir Karger
>akarger at cgr.harvard.edu
>
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>  
>

-- 
Stefan Kirov, Ph.D.
University of Tennessee/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
5700 bldg, PO BOX 2008 MS6164
Oak Ridge TN 37831-6164
USA
tel +865 576 5120
fax +865-576-5332
e-mail: skirov at utk.edu
sao at ornl.gov

"And the wars go on with brainwashed pride
For the love of God and our human rights
And all these things are swept aside"