Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access originally published online on May 22, 2009
Nucleic Acids Research 2009 37(Web Server issue):W33-W39; doi:10.1093/nar/gkp428
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Nucleic Acids Research, 2009, Vol. 37, No. suppl_2 W33-W39
© 2009 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Articles |
WebLab: a data-centric, knowledge-sharing bioinformatic platform
Center for Bioinformatics, National Laboratory of Protein Engineering and Plant Genetic Engineering, College of Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +86 10 6275 5206; Fax: +86 10 6275 1861; Email: luojc{at}pku.edu.cn Correspondence may also be addressed to Ge Gao. Tel: +86 10 6275 1861; Fax: +86 10 6275 1861; Email: gaog{at}mail.cbi.pku.edu.cn
Received January 30, 2009. Revised April 7, 2009. Accepted May 11, 2009.
With the rapid progress of biological research, great demands are proposed for integrative knowledge-sharing systems to efficiently support collaboration of biological researchers from various fields. To fulfill such requirements, we have developed a data-centric knowledge-sharing platform WebLab for biologists to fetch, analyze, manipulate and share data under an intuitive web interface. Dedicated space is provided for users to store their input data and analysis results. Users can upload local data or fetch public data from remote databases, and then perform analysis using more than 260 integrated bioinformatic tools. These tools can be further organized as customized analysis workflows to accomplish complex tasks automatically. In addition to conventional biological data, WebLab also provides rich supports for scientific literatures, such as searching against full text of uploaded literatures and exporting citations into various well-known citation managers such as EndNote and BibTex. To facilitate team work among colleagues, WebLab provides a powerful and flexible sharing mechanism, which allows users to share input data, analysis results, scientific literatures and customized workflows to specified users or groups with sophisticated privilege settings. WebLab is publicly available at http://weblab.cbi.pku.edu.cn, with all source code released as Free Software.