Another Month of Laboratory Informatics Fun in Boston
Written by Gloria Metrick on . Published as written. It may not reflect how these systems work today.
Last night, the Boston LIMS/Laboratory Informatics group had their latest meeting ( http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/36640/6A50095E87BA ).
Normally, we try to get users to speak about their systems, but we sometimes ask software vendors to speak on various topics. One of our members asked to hear about data integration issues and we ended up inviting someone from the Informatics division at Thermo Fisher Scientific to speak.
So, last night, Mark Muraski, Nautilus Implementation Manager, discussed the various issues with data integration. With the idea that companies need to integrate a variety of systems, LIMS, ELN, CDS and ERP, to name just a few, he went over a number of available strategies with us, listing both the pros and the cons of each strategy. He spent quite a few slides on methods such as XML and spoke quite a bit about web services. In fact, it seemed that most of our questions revolved around web services. Mark was able to answer all our questions in a non-product-specific manner, so that we understood what was happening in the industry.
I should add that Mark clearly understood the technical capabilities of the various options and was able to answer all our questions except the ones that involved predicting the future, although he was able to give us some of his thoughts on those, as well. :-)
My Point
As usual, my point is that, interesting as on-line discussions are, nothing replaces getting together in-person and hashing out the hot topics of the day. Not only was it an interesting meeting, but we had great interaction among the attendees.
Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com