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- They are typically computer scientists by training
- Typically have a basic knowledge of biology, but often need help from biologists to interpret biological significance of results
- Their work often involves writing scripts for analyzing biological data, but they do not have the resources to take the time to create user-friendly programs
Needs & Goals
1) A more efficient way for
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biologists to find the optimal experimental procedure
Need: A better way for biologists to communicate their hard-earned knowledge with each other - both what worked, and what didn’t work.
Biologists have to navigate a large amount of information and go through tedious trial-and-error to identify which particular variant of an experimental protocol is appropriate for their situation. At present, there is a communication barrier; : a lot of “little details” on a procedure are absent from the “official” published protocol in a journal, and interviewing other biologists one-on-one is time consuming. There is a need for a better way for biologists to communicate their hard-earned knowledge with each other - both what worked, and what didn’t work. This would hopefully reduce the trial-and-error process, as people would avoid doing things that were found to fail.
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Biologists are generally not comfortable with a command line interface and find it daunting to run code provided by their collaborators. They would like to have an easily accessible history of commands they have run in the past, as well as a tool which would prompt them to enter the necessary command line options for the script and explain the meaning of each option. They would also like to see useful examples and possible caveats for each command.
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