At the recent Bio-IT World Conference & Expo this week, Microsoft announced its “Amalga Life Sciences” software. Working with a network of life science vendors formed in 2006, called the BioIT Alliance, they’ve built a system to allow scientists to collect and connect data from multiple sources through “novel storage capabilities, ontology management functions, and a semantic query environment”.
Researchers face “an overwhelming challenge to collect analyze interpret and share complex data from a wide range of diseases and experiments ” Lee Hartwell president and director of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center said in a statement. FHCRC is an early adopter of the software Microsoft said.
They state that currently alot of visualization and analysis is done via Excel spreadsheets and charts, and they aim to take this to the next level by deploying analysis and visualization tools capable of drawing data from multiple systems simultaneously and cross-correlating them.
