Elsevier Open Source Software in Life Science Research: Practical Solutions to Common Challenges in the Pharmaceutical Industry and Beyond (Woodhead Publishing Series in Biomedicine)

The free/open source approach has grown from a minor activity to become a significant producer of robust, task-orientated software for a wide variety situations and applications. Examples range from core infrastructure platforms such as the apache web-server, powerful document indexing and search tools such as Lucene through to major user-orientated systems such as Mediawiki (which powers Wikipedia) and Drupal (which powers many diverse websites). To life science informatics groups, these systems present an appealing proposition - high quality software at a very attractive price. Open source software in life science research considers how industry and applied research groups have embraced these resources, discussing practical implementations that address real-world business problems. Key Features; discusses a broad range of applications from a variety of sectors; provides a unique perspective on work normally performed behind closed doors; highlights the criteria used to compare and assess different approaches to solving problems. Contents: Building research data handling systems with open source tools; Interactive predictive toxicology with Bioclipse and OpenTox; Utilizing open source software to facilitate communication of chemistry at RSC; Open source software for mass spectrometry and metabolomics; Open source software for image processing and analysis: Picture this with ImageJ; Integrated data analysis with KNIME; Investigation-Study-Assay, a toolkit for standardizing data capture and sharing; GenomicTools: An open source platform for developing high-throughput analytics in genomics; Creating an in-house omics data portal using EBI Atlas software; Setting up an omics platform in a small biotech; Squeezing big data into a small organisation; Design Tracker: An easy to use and fl exible hypothesis tracking system to aid project team working; Free and open source software for web-based collaboration; Developing scientifi c business applications using open source search and visualisation technologies; Utopia Documents: Transforming how industrial scientists interact with the scientific literature; Semantic MediaWiki in applied life science and industry: Building an Enterprise Encyclopaedia; Building disease and target knowledge with Semantic MediaWiki; Chem2Bio2RDF: A semantic resource for systems chemical biology and drug discovery; TripleMap: A web-based semantic knowledge discovery and collaboration application for biomedical research; Extreme scale clinical analytics with open source software; Validation and regulatory compliance of free/open source software; The economics of free/open source software in industry.