The Mobius Project, OSU Department of Biomedical Informatics, Multiscale Computing Laboratory

Field Applications of the Mobius Architecture

Components of the architecture have been successfully leveraged as data management middleware in a number of applications.

Use the navigation sidebar to jump to the descriptions of the application areas listed on this page.

Rescentris   [top]

In a collaboration with Rescentris, a company that makes eletronic lab notebook systems for genomic research, Mobius provided a framework for integrating and aggregating collections of disparate medical datasets. The application employed Mobius's ability to store, retrieve, and query distributed datasets modeled through XML schema. The application was able to interrogate relevant portions of numerous distinct medical datasets by attaching model elements to descriptions of common medical metadata. In particular, a Virtual Mako was used to interrogate and aggregate distributed datasets representing single nucleotide polymorphisms and molecular cytogenetic data via XPath queries.

Distributed Image Archive System (DPACS)   [top]

(Section under development)

Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit and
Visualization Toolkit (ITK/VTK)   [top]

Mobius has been used to store and manage image processing workflows and image datasets in a system designed for rapid implementation and distributed execution of image analysis applications. The system used the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), an open source software system by the National Library of Medicine designed to support the Visible Human Project, and the Visualization Toolkit (VTK), an open source software system for 3D vizualization and image processing. In our system, the processing pipeline discovered work by querying Makos, and the processing components utilized Makos to retrieve and store their input and output datasets.

BlockMan   [top]

Mobius is used in the development of BlockMan, an application currently under development which supports the indexing and partitioning of extremely large binary datasets in a distributed environment. BlockMan ingests the dataset, partitions it into chunks, and distributes the chunks as required by the size of the storage. BlockMan then provides a query interface into the data and allows for parallel retrieval of the queried results. The application is remarkable for its ability to allow the user to add queryable meaning to massive datasets by attaching metadata to the chunks, thereby enabling users to query into datasets which before were not only unwieldy because of their size but also extremely hard to consolidate and interrogate.

StorCloud   [top]

Mobius has been used for the development of a StorCloud application that demonstrates execution of spatio-temporal queries into large-scale, on-line databases of images and time-dependent 3D volumes on disk-based storage clusters and execution of image and visualization workflows on distributed collections of datasets.