xl-caBIG Smart Client Goals: Accessing caBIG through Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Office (MS) Excel's functionality, especially in terms of statistical analysis and visualization, allows it to dominate the spreadsheet market. These same features make Excel attractive to scientists in the Biomedical fields. For the last decade, the spreadsheet – specifically Excel – has been the primary manner by which biologists and biomedical scientists analyze cancer data.
Scientists traditionally analyzed a limited set of data collected in their labs or made available by a selected few collaborators. Thanks to the caBIG environment, scientists will have access to orders of magnitude more related data from researchers around the world. How will they analyze it to make meaningful deductions?
The xl-caBIG Smart Client is a set of C# Windows Form Contextual GUIs embedded in the Excel spreadsheet's Document Actions Pane. It allows users to construct queries for caBIG data-services and reformats the serialized XML responses as cells in the Excel Worksheet. The Smart Client's goal is to give scientists intuitive access to caBIG by leveraging their familiarity with the Windows environment and Excel's statistical tools.
Releases, Status, and Future Directions
xl-caBIG Smart Clients connect to the official caBIG dotNET server (67.15.68.28) in order to access caBIG services. The xl-caBIG Smart Client (v0.1), available here, lets users browse available caBIG Data-Services and investigate the Domain Objects they publish. Functionally, the xl-caBIG Smart Client is very similar to the caGRID Browser.
Future releases of the Smart Clients will provide a GUI for constructing queries in the caBIG Query Language. The results of the query will populate cells of the Excel worksheet.
