Treffer: Data Analysis of Microarrays Using SciCraft.

SciCraft is a general open source data analysis tool which can be used in the analysis of microarrays. The main advantage of SciCraft is its ability to integrate different types of software through an intuitive and user friendly graphical interface. The user is able to control the flow of analysis and visualisation through a visual programming environment (VPE) where programs are drawn as diagrams. These diagrams consist of nodes and links where the nodes are methods or operators and the links are lines showing the flow of data between the nodes. The diagrammatic approach used in SciCraft is particularly suited to represent the various data analysis pipelines being used in the analysis of microarrays. Efficient integration of methods from different computer languages and programs is accomplished through various plug-ins that handle all the necessary communication and data format handling. Currently available plug-ins are Octave (an open source Matlab clone), Python and R. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]