Microarray Data Sharing System

Improved reliability of microarray data and its reproducibility lead to recent increment in demand of data sharing and utilization among laboratories, but house-keeping and publicly opened microarray experimental data can hardly be accessed and utilized since they are in heterogeneous formats according to the various experimental methods and microarray platforms. In this paper, we propose a microarray sharing method which can easily retrieve and integrate microarray data from different experiment platforms, data formats, normalization methods, and analysis methods. Our system is based on web-service technology. The biologists of each site are able to search UDDI(Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) registry, and download microarray data with common data structure of standard format recommended by MGED(Microarray Gene Expression Databases) society. The common data structure defined in this paper consists of IDF(Investigation Design Format), ADF(Array Design Format), SDRF(Sample and Relationship Format), and EDF(Expression Data Format). These components play role as templates to integrate microarray data with various structure and can be stored in standard formats such as MAGE-ML, MAGE-TAB, and XML Schema. In addition, our system provides advanced tools of automatic microarray data submitter and file manager to manipulate local microarray data efficiently.