Re: [Gmod-ajax] Article: Using game design to build the next Digg or Flickr

[Mitch S. <mit...@be...>]

Ian Holmes wrote:
> So I keep posting this sort of thing even though I really don't know how 
> relevant these things are, and of course we do have a long list of more 
> practical immediate things to do (like, um, getting something that we 
> can seamlessly use in place of an existing GBrowse instantiation, 
> ideally before modENCODE is history...)
>   

I like the game angle; it seems like it could be a pretty rich vein of 
new UI ideas, which I get a big kick out of.

However, if at all possible I'd like to start moving things in a more 
concrete/applied direction.

Like collecting, for example.  We've talked about collecting things like 
tracks, but I think a lot of biologists would also be interested in 
collecting individual features (genes).  That's something that the 
biologists that I've worked with liked to do a lot (then they'd send me 
Excel files full of gene symbols that weren't necessarily the 
standardized symbols). Then I can also imagine them wanting to see SNPs 
near their genes, regulatory elements near their genes, etc.

I've been thinking that I'd like to make track definitions just be 
queries on a genomic data source (plus some information on how to render 
the result).  That's pretty much how the gbrowse config works right now; 
each track is defined in terms of the type of the feature to be 
displayed in it.  But I'd like to also allow for queries that are more 
general than just by type, for tracks like "the genes I'm interested in" 
or "SNPs near the genes I'm interested in", "SNPs near the genes that 
are active during development phase foo", "genes that are under GO term 
such-and-such", etc.

Mitch