BioMedia: multimedia information systems for biology research, education, and collaboration

The long-term goals of the recently started Biomedia project at SFSU are to provide multimedia information systems and applications for the research and education needs of several projects in the SFSU Biology Department. These applications involve a considerable amount of images and image sequence data, in addition to traditional text, genomic, and experimental measurement data. Our systems will allow biology researchers and students to store, index, annotate, search, visualize, analyze, collaborate, and share a large amount of heterogeneous biomedical data. Our initial focus in BioMedia is the creation of collaborative WWW site for the Hedgehog gene pathway. The Hedgehog (Hh) protein super family constitutes a group of closely related secreted proteins that control many crucial processes during the embryogenesis of tissues. The overall goals of the Hh WWW Site project are as follows: a) to provide a WWW site to be used by researchers and students studying the Hedgehog gene pathway and made available to broad community, and b) to provide advanced and innovative functionality enabling easy usage and management, community based content submission and updates, and asynchronous collaboration between researchers and students. In this paper we present the status and first results in building and researching technologies necessary for this WWW site.