Y. Wang, T. Can, Y.-F. Wang, and J. Su (USA)
Information-slips, protein visualization, collaborative system
: In this paper, we describe a software tool called Information-slips (i-slips) that provides a convenient and customizable mechanism for remote collaboration and data sharing in protein science. I-slips are small 3D objects that coexist with and augment the host 3D objects (in our application, protein models). Our i-slip design makes two main contributions. Firstly, i-slip goes beyond simple passive annotation to also provide active interactivity. It can embed an action to perform a user-defined operation on-demand. The condition to perform the action is event-driven. So i-slips can monitor the environment and automatically handle some predefined events without the user intervention. Secondly, i-slip is a highly versatile and adaptable information container. The user can tailor i-slip templates for new domain-specific objects, and develop new actions to embed domain-dependent algorithms. Furthermore, the storage and transportation of i-slips use XML for the sake of interoperability. Two key implementation techniques about visualization and customization are discussed here. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first protein visualization tool that supports user-contributed information and embeddable actions/activities.
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