Kip Canfield

FUNCTIONAL BIOINFORMATICS: THE CELLULAR RESPONSE DATABASE

Biological Scientists function in an increasingly data rich environment. The emerging field of bioinformatics is attempting to insure that this flow of information can be structured to support the generation of significant biological hypothesis and ultimately new knowledge. To date, most of the current databases have focused on protein and nucleic acid sequence information as the principle type of data stored for further interpretation. In this paper, we describe the Cellular Response Database. This database stores functional information regarding the changes of cellular gene expression associated with various stimuli, and supports queries linking cell types, expressed genes, and inducers. The database is designed to support information-intensive queries to aid in the determination of biological function, and is flexible enough to allow the storage of a broad range of experimental data such as cytotoxicity data, immunoassays of target gene protein expression, and others.

Improving interorganizational data interchange for drug development

This paper presents a reengineered process that uses a markup language to do interorganizational data interchange between the participants in the US drug development process. The two major goals of this paper are to present (1) a detailed enough description of the reengineered version of this process that a practitioner will be able to use it and (2) a case-study of the reengineering of an interorganizational data interchange system that is applicable to other areas in health care. The detailed description is augmented with a companion web-site that shows all programs in a working prototype. The case-study uses an IDEF0 model to show the structure of benefits from markup standards for interorganizational data interchange.

A Case Study of the Evolving Software Architecture for the FDA Generic Drug Application Process

This primary goal of this project was to develop a software architecture to support the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) generic drug application process by making it more efficient and effective. The secondary goal was to produce a scalable, modular, and flexible architecture that could be generalized to other contexts in interorganizational health care communications. The system described here shows improvements over the old system for the generic drug application process for most of the defined design objectives. The modular, flexible design that produced this new system offers lessons for the general design of distributed health care information systems and points the way to robust application frameworks that will allow practical development and maintenance of a distributed infrastructure.

The Navajo Language Literature Project: A Case Study in Client-side Design Patterns Using Asynchronous Requests

The Navajo Language Literature Project was established to create and deliver a web-based, digital library of Navajo language texts. The current focus is to deliver the texts on the web and allow collaborative editing for linguistic detail such as word parses and glosses. The original implementation of the project used a server-side design for the Internet applications. The addition of asynchronous f update to the server for this project gave the client web application more responsibility and started a line of inquiry into how much processing can be pushed to the web browser client. A major advantage of this move is a simplification of deployment that can be beneficial for small and unfunded projects in the humanities. The case study below defines and parameterizes a model for this client-side pattern.