Original Research Article
Concierge: Personal database software for managing digital research resources
1 Laboratory for Neuroinformatics, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan
2 Department of Electronic and Information Engineering, Suzuka National College of Technology, Japan
3 Research and Development Center for Academic Networks, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
This article introduces a desktop application, named Concierge, for managing personal digital research resources. Using simple operations, it enables storage of various types of files and indexes them based on content descriptions. A key feature of the software is a high level of extensibility. By installing optional plug-ins, users can customize and extend the usability of the software based on their needs. In this paper, we also introduce a few optional plug-ins: literaturemanagement, electronic laboratory notebook, and XooNlps client plug-ins. XooNIps is a content management system developed to share digital research resources among neuroscience communities. It has been adopted as the standard database system in Japanese neuroinformatics projects. Concierge, therefore, offers comprehensive support from management of personal digital research resources to their sharing in open-access neuroinformatics databases such as XooNIps. This interaction between personal and open-access neuroinformatics databases is expected to enhance the dissemination of digital research resources. Concierge is developed as an open source project; Mac OS X and Windows XP versions have been released at the official site (http://concierge.sourceforge.jp).
Keywords: software, resource management, resource sharing
Copyright: © 2007 Sakai, Aoyama, Yamaji and Usui. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.
*Correspondence: Shiro Usui, Laboratory for Neuroinformatics, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, 2-1 Hirosawa, Wako, Saitama 351-0198, Japan.e-mail: usuishiro@riken.jp
Citation: Sakai H , Aoyama T , Yamaji K and Usui S (2007) Concierge: Personal database software for managing digital research resources. Front. Neuroinform. 1:5. doi:10.3389/neuro.11.005.2007
Received: 12 September 2007; paper pending published: 08 October 2007; accepted: 16 October 2007; published online: 02 November 2007.
Edited by:
Jan G. Bjaalie, International Neuroinformatics Coordination Facility , Sweden; University of Oslo, Norway
Reviewed by:
Knut Lehre, University of Oslo, Norway
Rolf Kötter, Radboud University Medical Centre Nijmegen, Netherlands
Asif Jan, Ecole Polytechnique Federale Lausanne, Switzerland
Rolf Kötter, Radboud University Medical Centre Nijmegen, Netherlands
Asif Jan, Ecole Polytechnique Federale Lausanne, Switzerland
*Correspondence: Shiro Usui, Laboratory for Neuroinformatics, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, 2-1 Hirosawa, Wako, Saitama 351-0198, Japan.e-mail: usuishiro@riken.jp
