Enhancing data sharing in collaborative research projects with DASH

We describe a software framework, called DASH, that enables the facile access, maintenance, curation and sharing of computational biology data among collaborating research scientists. The DASH event-based framework enables members of team-based research projects to describe the multistep computational processing pipelines frequently required to generate data for sharing, monitors multiple distributed data stores for changes, and will then automatically invoke the appropriate processing pipeline(s). These pipelines can be used to communicate the results of data analyses to collaborators using mechanisms such as Web Services. We describe the overall design of the DASH system and the application of a simple DASH prototype to a collaborative pharmacogenomics research project involving several dozen researchers located at several different sites--the UCSF Pharmacogenetics of Membrane Transporters project.