The Information Managements Unit (IMU) will centralize, federate, disseminate and manage all experimental data, models and computational results in a centralized coherent repository named Information Management System (IMS). The unit will also continue to expand current developments of data-mining by integrating and filtering qualitative and quantitative data from relevant external sources such as online databases and legacy experimental literature. The IMS repository will be continually populated with highcontent experimental data including imaging data from internal sources as described above, modeling results, models and software developed from internal sources, as well as data mined from external sources to enrich the content of the IMS repository. The IMU will maintain local copies of processed versions of publicly available external databases for genes, proteins, protein-protein interactions and drug-protein interactions (i.e. PubMed, EntrezGene (1), Swiss-Prot (2), and DrugBank(3)). The data produced by the internal experimental efforts and modeling efforts associated with the proposed projects will be annotated using metadata (data that describes the data). XML schemas(4), Object Oriented and Relational Database schemas (5) will be developed to organize all these data for the purpose of optimal search, visualization, web-access, download retrieval, statistical analysis and modeling, as well as for the purpose of configuration management, auditing, reporting, backup, and security. The computational modeling efforts and experimental efforts would both benefit from standardization of data exchange and storage schemas. The collaborative interdisciplinary nature of the projects requires rapid flow, exchange, and reusability of information and information systems to facilitate and boost interactions among the laboratories. Therefore, effective sedimentation and sharing of research results, models and databases within the Center and with the research community will be achieved through web-based database interfaces and visualization tools, webbased interactive tools (i.e. Wiki), and other web-based/enabled technologies linked to the IMS repository. Additionally, since computational modeling, as well as initial analysis of experimental data often requires onthe- fly development of software utilities to support the ongoing wet and dry experimental research, the IMU will provide ad-hoc software services and solutions, including all aspect of software development life-cycle including: design, development, testing, training and documentation of the software utilities. These software tools will be cross-platform compatible and will be disseminated for free to the research community in hopes they will assist scientists, inside and outside the center, who have similar computational requirements.
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