Vision
Background
The development of an efficient and secure information technology infrastructure is one of the major issues for population-based and case-controls biobanks. Each biobank organization must either outsource development work to IT companies or maintain a team of database administrators, bioinformaticians and programmers to develop new software or adapt existing tools. Either way, each organization reproduces work done by other organizations. Such reinventing of the wheel is time-consuming, wasteful, and runs counter to the spirit of harmonization, communication and sharing among biobanking projects that is currently promoted by international initiatives such as the P3G consortium. OBiBa was founded to address this issue.
OBiBa's Approach
Given the variety and complexity of biobank activities, OBiBa has chosen an approach that is both modular and holistic. It consists of developing standalone applications that can be integrated into a comprehensive information management system for biobanks.
OBiBa’s applications will support various biobank activities including:
- Subject recruitment
- Clinical evaluation
- Biobank sample management
- Biochemical sample analysis
- Low and high throughput genotyping
- Data warehousing
- Statistical analysis for high data volume
- Databases federation
The advantages of a modular approach in which each activity is covered by an application capable of running without the others are twofold. First, it simplifies the development process. Second, it allows users to select only the modules they are comfortable using and use other software for other activities.
OBiBa subscribes to the open source approach to software development which fosters collaboration among developers, and readily allows software customization and maintenance by giving free access to source code.
OBiBa software is produced by teams of experts and developers in different parts of the world. All the teams share the same collaborative vision and use a common set of resources including a Wiki, an issue-tracking system, a source code repository, and deployment tools.
OBiBa shares a core belief with P3G, its parent organization: that international collaboration results in better science and better software solutions.