Continued Development, Evaluation and Testing of Sesame LIMS

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Sesame is a versatile, freely available, cloud laboratory information management system (LIMS) developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that is in use in multiple laboratories around the world both for small- scale and large-scale applications. It supports the gathering, organization, processing, and analysis of information from a variety of sources, including databases, bench scientists, laboratory instrumentation, and software packages. The Sesame LIMS has proved its value in structural and functional proteomics investigations, in traditional protein chemistry or molecular biology laboratories, and in management of shared instrumentation facilities. It enables collaborators to participate in a research project, with equivalent access to information and the ability to enter results and process data irrespective of location (given Internet access). The Sesame software is written in Java, uses CORBA as a middleware, and is interfaced to a relational database management system. The requested funds will be used to support the continued development, evaluation, and testing of the Sesame LIMS and to provide a freely available instance of it as 'software as a service'. The software development will be aimed at (1) improving the efficiency and flexibility of the Sesame framework, (2) making it easier for users to customize the software for their own needs, and (3) improving the existing applications and developing new ones in response to user needs. The goal is to make the software available to a larger clientele of structural biologists, molecular biologists, and biochemists. As part of this effort, we will creat reusable objects and provide an application programming interface to Sesame for developers, so they can create Sesame clients to solve problems specific to their laboratory. We will ensure that the software runs on a variety of platforms, supports a variety of relational database management systems, and that a free solution stack exists for the platforms supported. The methods for exporting and importing data to/from external data repositories will be maintained and kept up to date. We will continue to develop Web accessible user help pages and video tutorials. The schema and controlled vocabularies developed for various Sesame applications will be made available on the Web to interested users. All software will be open source.