title: Harvest: an open platform for developing web-based biomedical data discovery and reporting applications.
abstract: Biomedical researchers share a common challenge of making complex data understandable and accessible as they seek inherent relationships between attributes in disparate data types. Data discovery in this context is limited by a lack of query systems that efficiently show relationships between individual variables, but without the need to navigate underlying data models. We have addressed this need by developing Harvest, an open-source framework of modular components, and using it for the rapid development and deployment of custom data discovery software applications. Harvest incorporates visualizations of highly dimensional data in a web-based interface that promotes rapid exploration and export of any type of biomedical information, without exposing researchers to underlying data models. We evaluated Harvest with two cases: clinical data from pediatric cardiology and demonstration data from the OpenMRS project. Harvest's architecture and public open-source code offer a set of rapid application development tools to build data discovery applications for domain-specific biomedical data repositories. All resources, including the OpenMRS demonstration, can be found at http://harvest.research.chop.edu.
authors.affiliation: Center for Biomedical Informatics, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
authors.forename: Jeffrey W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Pennington
authors.forename: Byron
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Ruth
authors.forename: Michael J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Italia
authors.forename: Jeffrey
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Miller
authors.forename: Stacey
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Wrazien
authors.forename: Jennifer G
authors.initials: JG
authors.lastname: Loutrel
authors.forename: E Bryan
authors.initials: EB
authors.lastname: Crenshaw
authors.forename: Peter S
authors.initials: PS
authors.lastname: White
mesh_terms: D035843:Biomedical Research; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D003628:Database Management Systems; D016208:Databases, Factual; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D019982:Organizational Case Studies; D010067:Ownership; D012984:Software; D057170:Translational Research, Biomedical
keywords: application development; data discovery; data visualization; database; open-source