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intermine / bluegenes

A friendly next-generation interface for Genomic data discovery powered by InterMine
http://bluegenes.apps.intermine.org
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A new workflow for interacting with lists #364

Open heralden opened 5 years ago

heralden commented 5 years ago

This is me jotting down some thoughts on a feature that could be really useful to have in the future.

In InterMine, analysing genomic data involves creating multiple lists of genes/proteins and interacting with them by creating several different variations of a list, or combining different lists using a set operation like union. This puts a lot of demand on the user to keep an external note on every operation they do, and all the lists they have created along with in-depth information on the history of each list.

I think that by giving the user an interface where they have a graphical canvas on which they can construct a diagram consisting of lists and operations on lists, (visually it would be quite similar to a flowchart) we would be off-loading the user of the work required to keep track of this information by themselves, giving them a much more informative view which is always up-to-date.

In addition to this canvas, it could also be helpful to provide a history side-bar which displays a chronological view of every action the user has done to the diagram, so that they can easily revert to earlier stages of their diagram to experiment in a different direction.

Next step: Create a design sketch of the interface.

yochannah commented 5 years ago

This sounds fascinating!

heralden commented 5 years ago

As inspiration, Whimsical has a commercial webapp (also made with re-frame) for creating flowcharts. In this blogpost (https://whimsical.com/tech/how-we-built-whimsical/) they mention they use the JS libraries paper.js and draft.js. Sadly, it looks like they haven't open-sourced anything they've created.