Online Microarray tools

Open source was always the favourite with scientists, Now with companies liek Google and IBM pushing the concept of software as a service educational institutions and non profit organisation alike can offer there efficiencies and expertise to scores of scientists cost effectively

for a start take a look at the online microarray analysis tool offered at European Bioinformatics Institute

http://www.embl-ebi.ac.uk/expressionprofiler/

standardization in microarray analysis software industry

scouting for the right software for the microarray analysis software , kept me thinkng why despite these software being used by scores or scientists no one has come forward to create what can be called as a standard for such software, the confusion rains in this field as one company’s software data do not work with another one and vice versa, For an industry like biology and drug discovery  that is trying to benefit from the knowledge of mathematics statitics and chemistry physics inability to port data across platform is a serious roadblock. there are standards such as MIAMe and MAGE but these are just data standards, not for softwares, I believe ther should be  something similar to ISO standards, SEI CMI etc.

majority of the newsgroup and forums are used by graduate and at times senor researchers to find out which is the best software to be used, I thought of starting a wiki page where researchers can post their comments and rate the products and compare the features against each other,