The Simons Scientific Information Management System:

BackgroundMaking decisions about scientific direction, such as funding of research programs, requires a variety of information sources. Science officers require knowledge of multiple internal sources about grants, as well as multiple external sources about grants and publications. Access to a wide range of systems can increase costs and reduce the speed of decisions. Different kinds of tasks (use cases) often result in very different software solutions, such as customized “dashboards”. These attempts usually fail due to long delivery times, measured in months or years. By the time the dashboard is delivered, decisions and data have changed. Our approach is to produce a platform for rapidly configuring decision support dashboards that can be delivered in a matter of days or hours. ObjectivesOur goal was to produce a decision support platform with the following capabilities: 1. Build a typical dashboard in hours, with more complex dashboards taking a few days. 2. Build most dashboards without any programming, using configuration by science officers or business process analysts. 3. Use standard components and web technologies to simplify maintenance and improve interoperability. 4. Provide flexible access to data for new software modules. 5. Support sophisticated and intuitive searching, with support for querying by terms meaningful to users.  MethodsWe designed a data warehouse with an extensible data model for storing a wide variety of data about scientific research, and defined lightweight methods for extracting and loading data from internal and external sources. Next, we added a robust, web-native data-access layer (HTSQL), a rapid web-application development framework (HTRAF), and, finally, a visual application builder (the HTRAF VAB). The first pass at semantic search was handled via AlchemyAPI web service.

ResultsWe developed the platform using an agile methodology over 10 weekly iterations. We then took two weeks to configure the first prototype of a decision-support tool suite: a set of interconnected dashboards for reviewing grants and grant applications and making decisions about their status. The prototype included the following screens: application dashboard, grant dashboard, publication dashboard, scientist profile, collaboration dashboard and home/search page. We were able to deliver three complete designs of the suite (a total of 21 different screens) for a usability review. Data provided by the prototype was judged useful for helping science officers make decisions about grant applications, and one design was selected as the most intuitive. Preliminary semantic search functionality showed some promise, but was too immature to evaluate.

ConclusionsA well-designed generic platform can facilitate inexpensive and rapid delivery of tools to support a wide range of decision-making tasks. The largest challenge was successfully integrating data sources with various degrees of cleanliness and completeness. Data cleaning and normalization are likely to remain challenging, as the number of data sources pulled into the platform continues to increase. We expect to make the results of this project available to the research community and believe it will help inform decisions about scientific directions in autism research. 

L. Rozenblit1, O. McGettrick1, C. Tirrell1, M. Peddle1, H. Agnew1, B. Lawlor1, N. Sinanis1, S. Johnson2Supporting scientific decision-making in autism research using a lightweight web-development methodology

Data source 1Data source 1External data sources

Data source 1Data source 1Internal data sources

Application Development Toolkit (HTRAF IDE)

Data Access via HTSQL

Extract, load, transform

Data Warehouse

Decision Support Application

Googlehttp://domain.com

Web Page Title

Architecture of a decision support systemThe system combines data from multiple sources and makes it

available to decision makers via rapidly developed web-based tools.

Integrating disconnected data setsDecisions about funding research programs depend on information from internal process records (text documents, spreadsheets), internal grant submission data (proposalCENTRAL), external grant information (from NIH), and publication data (PubMed).

Viewing a list of publications in the application

External Grant data

Publication Data Internalprocess records

Data Warehouse

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Powerful data access via HTSQLThe multiple integrated data sets are only useful if they are accessible. HTSQL, a web-native query language, enables development of data-driven applications.

to see all grants in the system… navigate to:https://sims.rexdb.com/grant

to see all applications over $50,000… navigate to:

https://sims.rexdb.com/application?amount>50000

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2 Rapid application development with the HTRAF IDE

The decisions being made today may be different from those being made next week. The decision support application must change rapidly in response to evolving needs. The HTRAF IDE enables to developers to build screens in a matter of hours or days rather than weeks or months.

A developer uses the visual application builder to create a new page. To build pages, users add HTML objects that are connected to one or more database tables.

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Agile application development: multiple weekly iterationsEvery week new decisions must be made, new data becomes available, users' needs change. We develop improvements to the decision support-tool as quickly as they can be designed. We delivered dashboards for grant review, portfolio analysis, conflict of interest detection, and more.

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Grant Submission Data proposalCENTRAL

1Prometheus Research, LLC, New Haven, CT 2Weill Cornell Medical College

Researcher profile

Grant application review Publication review

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