Lysa, a distributed collaborative multiple users interface for exploring genomics databases

Many databases and software tools are available for biologists in order to have access to genomic information. In a SQL manner, our information system GenoMEDIA addresses the problem of integrating heterogeneous data-bases and software utilities within a generic distributed platform. Lysa increases the GenoMEDIA SQL interface by adding an interactive collaborative graphical environment. Upon a usual query on biological database, gigabytes of data could be returned to the users. The aim of Lysa, through the databall concept, a certain kind of data introspection and collaborative engine, is to allow groups of users to make semantic links in these huge amounts of data. The main point of this paper is the collaborative framework written for Lysa. This framework allows multiple users to work upon the same shared biological data. This was written in order to add the capabilities and the knowledge of multiple users in order to extract information of the huge mass of data coming from biological databases.