Purposes
Surveyor provides decision support and activity tracking capabilities by:
- providing automatic sequence categorization according to pre-defined rules
- capturing further manual annotations of various types (text, images) associated with sequences
- tracking of the activity status of all sequences: what experiments have been done, what is next to come
Usage
Used internally by:
- technicians and scientists
- management (very important: this made it possible to provide clear understanding by decision makers by delivering unfiltered information directly at their fingertips)
Used remotely by:
- academic partners
- corporate partners
Components
- An automated sequence analysis system (in this case, the GeneWorld system from Pangea Systems, Inc.)
- An inference engine and processed results database ("extraction database", essentially a datawarehouse)
- A thin client (Web browser) visualizer
Technical overview Design overview
- Automation of analyses and interpretation
- Reliance on a relational database (now conventional but relatively new in the field at the time)
- data and information are always available and safe
- JAVA-generated HTML pages (note: JSP technology was not available at that time)
- ease of delivery for graphical depiction of data
- facilitates advanced data filtering. Very important to avoid flooding the user
- Reliance on expert systems
- enables sophisticated, automated inferences derived from underlying data
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