By
It’s a shopping bonanza for developers at neuroinformatics groups everywhere! Confused? We were at first as well. Let’s start at the beginning…
Integrity has been working for the last eight months conducting usability testing, re-architecting and re-designing a massive (huge) global healthcare application built by Washington University’s Neuroinformatics Research Group. The application, called XNAT, is a highly extensible open source imaging informatics system that helps facilitate data sharing and quality assurance for large-scale research projects involving radiological images and data. (Translation—it’s really cool and might one day be used by the research team that finds a cure for Alzheimer’s.)
Since it’s an open source platform, developers can modify and add functionality through plugins to fit their research group’s specific needs. And in the spirit of sharing, we were tasked with creating a marketplace to house all those plugins so the developer community could share their bits and pieces with each other.
It’s like the Chrome extension web store for research geeks!
Taking the best principles of an e-commerce site, we crafted a wireframe featuring categorization, sorting and filtering, as well as “product pages” complete with screenshots, documentation and author credits. We gave them lots of options for featuring content, as well as the ability to create “packages” that group together plugins for specific research areas. Oh, and we did this all in a highly customized WordPress install, just because we could.
Already receiving praise from the development community, the XNAT Marketplace is open and ready for business! Shoppers, take your mark…
