1. Information Management
IBM Software Life Sciences
Physion offers software created by scientists, for scientists. Its
cloud-based Ovation solution makes it easy to store, organize, manage
and share experimental research data. By breaking down barriers to
scientific collaboration, Ovation maximizes the value of data otherwise
trapped on individual researcher desktops or within organizational
silos.
Getting more from research data
Explosive growth in data-intensive research is driving greater
collaboration in the life sciences. Huge, diverse data sets need a range
of specialist analytical skills, making it hard for any single researcher
to run an entire project. In parallel, academic and commercial
organizations are pushed to achieve more with less funding. Around
USD30 billion is spent annually on data collection in academia alone,
and much of the data remains locked away on researcher systems.
Barry Wark, Founder and CEO at Physion, says: “Physion makes
research data discoverable and shareable, maximizing its value. During
my own PhD, I experienced how difficult and time-consuming it was to
manage and share data.”
Physion
Managing and sharing scientific data maximizes the
value of research investments
Overview
The need
Funding pressures and explosive data
growth are compelling scientists to
collaborate. How can they manage
and share valuable research data
that is trapped on local systems or in
organizational silos?
The solution
Using IBM® Cloudant™ Dedicated
Cluster as a cloud-based
database-as-a-service approach,
Physion’s Ovation is an intuitive solution
that helps bench scientists to manage,
enrich and share experimental data of any
type.
The benefit
Powerful search and seamless
synchronization enables easy offline
access and collaboration; maximizes
value of research data through sharing;
and removes time and effort required for
database management.
Improving data management can result in valuable
scientific breakthroughs, as Barry Wark, Founder
and CEO at Physion, explains: “One of our research
clients had collected several data sets from similar,
yet disparate, research projects. With Ovation, this
data could be aggregated and analyzed together
for the first time, which meant the client was able
to publish new research papers without even doing
additional experiments.”
2. Information Management
IBM Software Life Sciences
2
Knowing the importance of grass-roots acceptance, Physion set out
to create a tool to make the lives of bench scientists easier, while
simplifying data management and collaboration.
“Scientists expect local, offline access to their data, but also want the
benefits of distributed collaboration and synchronization,” says Wark.
“The other challenge is how to manage highly heterogeneous metadata
and its tendency to change as new experiments are performed.”
Simple data management in the cloud
Physion’s initial use of relational databases to prototype its Ovation
data management and collaboration platform raised challenges
around scalability, performance and schema changes. By selecting
IBM Cloudant Dedicated Cluster, Physion gained a scalable data layer
that synchronizes data between the cloud and multiple local clients.
“Our replication needs led us to Apache CouchDB™, which is the basis
of the NoSQL Cloudant Dedicated Cluster,” says Wark. “With this
database-as-a-service solution, we have no database to manage, so we
can focus on what we do best: helping scientists.”
Bench scientists drag-and-drop experimental data to a desktop Ovation
client, which supports local search and queries, while synchronizing
data to the cloud. Automatically harvested metadata is stored in the
Cloudant Dedicated Cluster, while binary data is stored in per-user
containers.
“Users can organize their files simply by project and experiment,
and effortlessly enrich the metadata every time they interact with it,”
says Wark. “They can easily find past data through Ovation, either
downloading it for offline use or moving it to another cloud service for
analysis. Tracking outcomes is simple: you tell Ovation which files went
in, what analysis took place, and what the results were.”
Solution components
Software
• IBM® Cloudant™ Dedicated Cluster
3. Information Management
IBM Software Life Sciences
3
Maximizing the value of research
“Ovation lets scientists collaborate using synchronized data sets,”
says Wark. “The offline capability removes a further barrier to
collaboration, so users can work on the road or in remote field locations
with unreliable network links.”
The flexible schema inherent in Cloudant Dedicated Cluster makes
Ovation ideal for storing experimental data, where constant change
is the norm. Alex Huk, Associate Professor of Neuroscience and
Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, comments: “We
treat visual motion as a model system for investigating how the brain
integrates information over space and time. Each experimental session
is dynamic and unique, and it’s practically impossible to manually
record every important variable. In particular, we can’t stop the
experiment each time there might have been a change, then switch files,
make a note and re-start. Ovation enables us to see each experiment as
a richly-described continuous narrative.”
By keeping a full record of the relationship between data files and
analytical results, Ovation helps scientists validate research before
presenting papers. This capability also ensures that no knowledge is
lost if researchers leave an organization, maximizing the value of past
investments.
“We might write up a few papers right away, but it is likely that we’ll
feed off our datasets like a Thanksgiving turkey: other ideas will arise
as we get down to the leftovers,” says Huk. “However, memories fade
as the original key people move to other projects. Using Ovation to
go from raw data, through the analysis pipeline, and out to published
figures, enables us to get the most out of these precious datasets.”
For more information
To learn more about IBM Cloudant solutions, contact your
IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit us at:
www.ibm.com/software/data/cloudant
For more information about Physion, visit: physion.us
“With IBM Cloudant
Dedicated Cluster, we
don’t have to use valuable
resources for managing
databases, and can
instead focus on creating a
better data model for our
customers’ data.”
— Barry Wark, Founder and CEO at Physion
