title: DIPSBC--data integration platform for systems biology collaborations.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Modern biomedical research is often organized in collaborations involving labs worldwide. In particular in systems biology, complex molecular systems are analyzed that require the generation and interpretation of heterogeneous data for their explanation, for example ranging from gene expression studies and mass spectrometry measurements to experimental techniques for detecting molecular interactions and functional assays. XML has become the most prominent format for representing and exchanging these data. However, besides the development of standards there is still a fundamental lack of data integration systems that are able to utilize these exchange formats, organize the data in an integrative way and link it with applications for data interpretation and analysis.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We have developed DIPSBC, an interactive data integration platform supporting collaborative research projects, based on Foswiki, Solr/Lucene, and specific helper applications. We describe the main features of the implementation and highlight the performance of the system with several use cases. All components of the system are platform independent and open-source developments and thus can be easily adopted by researchers. An exemplary installation of the platform which also provides several helper applications and detailed instructions for system usage and setup is available at http://dipsbc.molgen.mpg.de.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  DIPSBC is a data integration platform for medium-scale collaboration projects that has been tested already within several research collaborations. Because of its modular design and the incorporation of XML data formats it is highly flexible and easy to use.
authors.affiliation: Department of Vertebrate Genomics, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Ihnestr. 63-73, 14195 Berlin, Germany. dreher@molgen.mpg.de
authors.forename: Felix
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Dreher
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Kreitler
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Hardt
authors.forename: Atanas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kamburov
authors.forename: Reha
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Yildirimman
authors.forename: Karl
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Schellander
authors.forename: Hans
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Lehrach
authors.forename: Bodo M H
authors.initials: BM
authors.lastname: Lange
authors.forename: Ralf
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Herwig
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling; D023281:Genomics; D060066:Protein Interaction Maps; D040901:Proteomics; D049490:Systems Biology; D018511:Systems Integration