Genome/MOD Face Caucus at GMOD 2007 January 18-19

[Don Gilbert]

Dear Doreen and colleagues at Gramene,

We seek your comments and participation in a model organism / genome
database user interface caucus, to be held at the upcoming GMOD
meeting (January 18-19, San Diego, following the PAG 2007
Plant and Animal Genome conference, http://www.intl-pag.org/).
See http://www.gmod.org/user-interface-caucus

Many MODs have extensive experience in the common and complex
questions that scientists ask of genome projects, and how
best to answer these. This caucus will draw on this experience, and
allow us to share it with each other and with new projects.

We will have presentations from several MODs and discussion on good
common practices, to be used to guide new and existing projects.

This caucus is focused on user/human interfaces, not the informatics
underpinings.  Though many attendees are expected from the
bioinformatics domain, we welcome presentations from biocurators and
biologists, who generally are more knowledgable than computists on
what works well in answering genome questions.

We would like to highlight common usage in each presentation, as well
as your choices on good interfaces, with these preliminary topics:

  * How to search for name of gene, view information (gene page)
    -- How do we handle the most common use of genome databases?
    
  * Search for genes that cause a phenotype or GO association (ie, by attribute)
    -- How does a scientist best find MOD information from 
    biological concepts?
    
  * Generate a customized report on selected aspects of a gene
    -- How can a scientist distill portions of interest from
    lots of genomic information? 
    
  * Generate bulk output based on a query
    -- How can one answer a question from thousands of genes?
    
  * Combine the results at your MOD with information from other data sources
    -- Many scientists work with several genome websites to
    answer a research question. How do MODs facilitate this?
    
Please comment or suggest others. These common threads are a way to
draw out the expertise of MODs. We don't expect all presenters to
answer all of the above equally. 

If your project expects to have someone attending this GMOD meeting,
or at the PAG meeting, please consider bringing a slide presentation
on this topic. If we can't fit all in as presenters, we can use all
for reference material.

One outcome will be a working paper to guide GMOD developers and
consumers in good user interface methods.

You can post comments, and sign up to present, at
  http://www.gmod.org/user-interface-caucus
or email us to add your comments.


Sincerely,


Don Gilbert  gilbertd at indiana.edu
Scott Cain   cain at cshl.edu