Kurt and the group
Let me say right off - Kurt I am in 100% agreement with you - lab notebooks
belong with the past - we need the cooperation of the software industry and
the governmental agencies to bring scientific record keeping into the 21st
century.

You may have been indirectly referring to Object Relational Database
Management systems which are just now emerging from Oracle and Informix. I
have seen some examples of archiving and retrieving images in an ORDBMS and
it works very well.  One can present an actual image as the search target
(no annotation needed, but things like date or owner can be used to narrow
the search) and the system will retrieve all the image that "look like the
target". Even more remarkable one can actually make a drawing such as a
black background with some green circles sprinkled throughout and the system
will retrieve your FITC images. All of this is based on a database plugin
called a datablade by Informix and a Data Cartridge by Oracle, developed by
Virage.

The real utility of this system is that it can be tied to "standard" data in
tables (rows and columns) and once the images are retrieved any associated
data tables can also be retrieved.

Using ORDBMS rather than MO or CD ROMs has other advantages of backup and
restore, security and your friendly database group takes care of all the
data.

Mike Esterman
Scientific Imaging Center
Lilly Research Labs
Indianapolis IN 46285
[log in to unmask]

We may have a
>rough idea where to look in our own data record for a particular result,
>but what if we have to find the results generated by someone else who is no
>longer with the lab/company? How many of you annotate those CDs you burn
>with some readable record of what the contents represent?
>
>If we ever expect to retrieve any random piece of our data, then we need
>some form of searchable database of our results. But what is the unit, the
>"record" of this database? An image? A set of images, such as a ratio time
>series or a confocal stack? An experiment? A folder of images and graphs
>extracted from them? Do we database everything, or do we apply some
>selection criteria to keep the database to a reasonable size?
,
>
>Kurt
>
>________________________________________________________________________
>Kurt M. Scudder, Research Scientist          tel: +45 4442 1412
>Novo Nordisk BioImage                             fax: +45 4442 1411
>Moerkhoej Bygade 28                               email: [log in to unmask]
>DK-2860 Soeborg, Denmark