MacResearch

In 'Showcase' reviews, the reviewer is the developer. No claim of objectivity is made, but it’s a chance for the developer to show off his/her app. Here, Rory Macneil discusses the the online lab notebook e-CAT, which just entered beta testing.

Author: Rory Macneil
Position: CEO
Affiliation: Axiope

e-CAT, which was released for beta testing in mid-September, is the first fully fledged online lab notebook specifically designed to enable lab scientists to conveniently document experiments and manage data online. e-CAT was developed to meet the requirements of scientists like those discussed on the MacResearch Electronic Lab Notebook forum . We designed e-CAT in close collaboration with working scientists at the FDA and a number of academic research institutions.

e-CAT has the following features:

• A GUI with the look and feel of a lab notebook
• Web data entry
• Collaboration support: groups, permissions, data sharing
• Commenting on, signing and authorizing experiments
• Scalable data management for tens of millions of records
• Flexible, user-configurable database design and restructuring
• Powerful, rapid and effective search
• Image management for an extensive range of commonly used scientific file formats
• Full support for IP and regulatory compliance

Like all of Axiope’s products, e-CAT is cross platform, and runs on OSX, Linux and Windows. We have a longstanding policy of support for Apple products, reflecting the widespread use of MACs and other Apple offerings in the scientific community (see here for a description of how Axiope teamed with Apple to optimize e-CAT’s predecessor Catalyzer for the XServe/XRaid data storage platform for image management at Children’s Hospital Boston).

An important additional utility taking our support for Apple scientific research into the smartphone era comes from the fact that e-CAT is accessed through a web browser (Safari, Firefox or IE7). So, an iPhone or iPod can be used to enter data into e-CAT. Bench scientists using e-CAT can now enter data away from their desktop, anywhere in the lab. This capability will become even more useful when e-CAT’s sister product i-CAT, a browser-based scientific inventory management app with integrated barcoding capability, is introduced next year (see here for details).

We are trying to enhance e-CAT's usefulness by providing meaningful online support - this was the number one request that came back from a survey of scientists we conducted – ahead of any single feature request! At www.axiope.com there are two introductory videos and a Help section which has been written in plain English with a view to enabling the ordinary (i.e. non-technical) user to quickly and naturally become familiar with e-CAT and fit e-CAT into their normal working practices.