Software Database

• Link to tasks described in wiki

• Link to questions asked about this software

• Each software can be associated with multiple functional tags. (ChIP-Seq->peak-calling, ChIP-Seq->differential binding, ChIP-Seq->replicates, ChIP-Seq->enrichment testing)

• each software has its own wiki page

• Users can vote up the software they've used and liked; and vote down / complaint (maybe; will this be abused?) if they had some issue with it. Complaints can break up into categories:

  • Difficulty in installation; too many bugs and not maintained; results unsatisfactory compared to other software tried.
  • This could benefit software developer who intend to improve their software, and users to choose to use software that is well maintained.

• Required field

  • time of the latest release
  • maintained?
  • programing language
  • supported operating system
  • Minimum/Recommended Memory
  • Estimated running time

• Comparisons of performances between softwares on a certain task; can refer to benchmarks in published results; maybe in a separate section in wiki. Will guide user to choose between software.

• Dilemma: Shopping list question - questions about which tool, library, product or resource you should use are not very good because they quickly become obsolete and often are just about the preferences of the answerer. To keep our software recommendations working over time, we should have a more comprehensive strategy other than simply counting the number of votes for each software. Thoughts?

  • A weighted vote that values recent votes more than older votes.
  • can classify software into three categories according to votes: (1) obsolete: most votes comes from past. (2) stable: votes accumulate evenly over time (3) trending: new software that get most votes recently.