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The Catalyzer information management platform uses
catalogs to store information. Catalogs are structured, hierarchical
documents which contain various kinds of data: annotations, extracts
from files produced by data acquisition equipment (e.g., microscopes),
image thumbnails, document outlines, spreadsheet data, web links.
Large, uninterpreted binary data, such as images, are not stored in
the catalog but the catalog maintains information about where the
image is stored (e.g., on a storage area network). Because of this,
catalogs are relatively small (typically up to a few MB).
Users interact with catalogs via a desktop client and/or a standard
browser connected to the Catalyzer server. Catalyzer's desktop client
lets the user create and modify catalogs in the same way that Word can
be used for text documents or Excel for tables. The desktop client
can upload catalogs and data to the server, and download catalogs from
the server. An automated upload application can create catalogs
automatically from acquired data (e.g., microscope images) and upload
these catalogs and the associated data to the server. The server
provides access to catalogs and data through web browsers.
Many pieces of data acquisition equipment, and data analysis software
applications, produce data files which have embedded within them much
information valuable to the scientist or investigator. For example,
confocal microscopy images contain detailed information on the
settings of the microscope when the image was acquired, and even notes
typed into the microscope by the user during the experiment.
Catalyzer extracts this metadata automatically and presents it in a
structured form in the catalog. The metadata is extracted by a family
of plug-ins, each of which is specialized for a particular
data format. Plug-ins also create a small visual representation (or
thumbnail) of the raw data (e.g., the image, or the spectrogram) which
is presented to the user in the catalog, thus allowing users to
eyeball their data without having to run the specialized application
provided with the data acquisition instrument.
Plug-ins interact with the Catalyzer platform via an Application
Programming Interface which is made available to in-house, outsourced
and third-party software developers in our Software Development Kit
(SDK). The SDK provides a common and well-documented structure for
creating plug-ins without requiring any changes to the Catalyzer base
code. If you are interested in obtaining our SDK, please contact us.
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