Development of an informatics tool for crystallography laboratory administrators

With increased demand for storage of scientific data comes a corresponding demand for efficient retrieval mechanisms necessary for analytical and reporting purposes. As is often the case, the design of databases to support scientific data is (rightly so) driven by the science. Unfortunately, this "science-centric" view of data management does not make the subsequent reporting of information easy. The natural solution to such a problem is, of course, a data warehouse approach to scientific data management. The focus of this project is the design of a data warehousing architecture for scientific data. Our goal is to separate the science-specific aspects of the information from the reporting and analysis requirements. The problem domain we are currently investigating is crystallographic structure data, coupled with metadata concerning the structure. The paper describes ITCLA - an Informatics Tool for Crystallography Laboratory Administrators. We report on the current state of ITCLA, as well as our future plans.