Chapter 1 Introduction
Motivation
Tercen promotes collaboration for data analysis. Not everyone can code or even wants to, but everyone should benefit from the explosion of data and code currently taking place. Tercen allows non programmers (e.g. biologists) to explore their data and allows programmers (e.g. bioinformaticians) to upload their code (or web-apps) for the biologist to use. By offering this services we believe biologist get empowered and can claim back control of their data. The bioinformatician gets liberated from the operational details and day to day analysis demands from the biologist. This is summed up with the phrase:
Tercen empowers the biologist and liberates the bioinformatician.
Challenges
There are challenges for both the biologist and bioinformatician.
Biologist’s challenges:
- Get control of data
- Handle large data sizes
- Reduce analysis time
- Integrate external databases
- Visual Interaction
Bioinformatician’s challenges:
- Validate methodologies
- Improve analysis quality
- Educate biologists on statistical techniques
- Reduce time spent on IT support
Way forward
A new generation of tools and approaches are necessary. Tercen aims to be such an approach. Tercen is a platform where biologist and bioinformatician work easily together and upload, store and compute data.
A more harmonious state between the programmers and non-programmers is achieved using Tercen.
The main features of Tercen are:
- Generate any visual
- Visual computation
- Workflow analysis and customization
- Integrate external knowledge
- Sharing analysis
- Sharing data
- Results reporting
- Project centric analysis
- Data provenance
- Add operators or apps (i.e. plug-ins)
- Programmatic access (Tercen API)
- Cloud hosted or on-site
- Zero install
For a deeper understanding about Tercen read the next chapter and consult the specific chapter on a particular feature.
There are also online videos, found in the Tercen youtube channel
There are also some extra online material found in the learn section of our website.