Design and evaluation of CATPA: Curation and Alignment Tool for Protein Analysis Conference

Dalkilic, MM, Sengupta, A. (2005). Design and evaluation of CATPA: Curation and Alignment Tool for Protein Analysis . 1 190-194. 10.1145/1066677.1066721

cited authors

  • Dalkilic, MM; Sengupta, A

abstract

  • We present a new application for experimental biologists, the Curation Alignment Tool for Protein Analysis (CATPA), that allows for the efficient and effective creation, storage, management, querying, and visualizing of experimentally curated protein families. Protein families in general include paralogs having diverged from a duplication and orthologs. There is more than two decades worth of biological information and more data emerging, but there has not yet been an effective means of dealing with this data. It is our contention that an information system could be created whose appearance was suitable to the visual nature-particularly through alignments-of the information while the underpinnings were formal and followed standard software engineering principles. Thus, biologists can interact with the system easily because the data is in the form that they are accustomed to, but they can be assured that there is a sound data model underneath. It is our hope that this will allow biologists to spend more time on the biological science and less time on the information science. In order to help evaluate the utility of this system, we have performed a formal quantitative and qualitative usability study. Usability evaluation of CATPA was performed to compare the performance of CATPA with a similar tool, and users were found to to significantly more efficient using CATPA for a number of different types of tasks. Copyright 2005 ACM.

publication date

  • December 1, 2005

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

start page

  • 190

end page

  • 194

volume

  • 1