becoming urgent, given the possibility to automatize—at least
partially—the analysis of experiments. An obvious example is the
necessity to perform statistical analyses on the size distribution of
cell or cellular compartments, which has been a traditional, time-
consuming chore in biological laboratories, involving manual
delineation of contours and calculation of areas/volumes before
statistical testing. Image processing techniques (segmentation,
either supervised or unsupervised) allow saving considerable
amounts of researcher’s time, in doing this type of evaluations.
In light of these considerations, at our laboratory, the decision
was taken to fit the lab with an informatics infrastructure for data
exchange and processing. In doing so, it has been considered that
the lab personnel had generally no particular skill or previous
experience in information engineering, so one key requirement
for managing a quantitative, computer-based approach in image
analysis was to make available easily usable software tools, preferably
from open source developers.
In the following, we briefly describe the design and deployment
at our lab of a suitable platform (COSYSBI, for COoperative
SYStems Biology) for System biology. It is a tool for communica-
tion, data collection, sharing and dissemination of scientific results
of the various members of the lab.
Through a structured organization, the COSYSBI portal,
namely, the COSYSBI Communication Center, provides access
via the web to a diverse range of information, document reposi-
tories, applications, internal processes, and services, breaking the
barriers of space and time in which different researchers’ activity
usually occurs. This results in efficiency improvement of the indi-
vidual as well as of the groups referring to the lab. While the
advantages of using a portal in the field of dissemination of infor-
mation are clear, the use of the portal for the development of
collaborative and interactive activities is not yet established.
The COSYSBI Communication Center, therefore, in addition
to being a repository of information and a channel of communica-
tion, is an online collaboration tool that, through the virtual work-
place, allows and promotes collaboration between cross-functional
workgroups, allowing the real-time evaluation of the best solution.
The relocation of the space/time is achieved through the use of
the network and the ability to converge the channels of communi-
cation and of these functions/services: Audio/video conferencing,
email discussion, and/or web (mailing list, news groups), share and
edit documents in real time (co-editing), group browsing
(co-browsing), surveys, brainstorming.
The intranet portal was implemented through a multidisciplin-
ary approach that takes into account different aspects of communi-
cation, web design, organization, architecture, integration, and
application development.342 Garima Verma et al.