SANBI hosts colloquium on databases

On the 20th of August 2015, SANBI hosted a colloquium entitled Store, Query and Analyze @ SANBI (programme here) where six SANBI researchers presented on storing, analysing and presenting data using databases. After an introduction by Peter van Heusden, Hocine Bendou presented on using Django to build a web application to integrate sample data drawn from a number of Biobanks. Lunga Sizani introduced ZODB, the Zope Object database, an object database that allows Python coders to directly store Python objects in persistent storage. After a brief tea break Junaid Gamieldien presented his work on using the Neo4J graph database to store and query a large scale semantic network for biological data.

Mario Jonas took a turn towards sequence oriented data and presented the JBrowse gene browser and its use of JSON and AJAX for highly responsible navigation of gene feature data. Samuel Egieyeh walked us through KNIME  (demo) and DataWarrior as a tools for chemoinformatics. Finally Werner Veldsman presented his work on a JSON database (based on Typicode JSON Server) for exploring and presenting literature associated with particular SNPs.