Tripal Introduction and Core Development Efforts

Tripal is a toolkit to help research groups with new biological data, such as new genome assemblies, publish their data online using community standards. It provides data loaders, display pages, and search tools for scientific data. Such sites have the ability to control user access, allow non-technical users to provide content as well as some curation, and facilitate community interaction. Tripal is currently in use by quite a few genome databases including KnowPulse, the Genome Database for Rosaceae, GeneNetEngine, i5k, Banana Genome Hub, Hardwood Genomics, Legume Information System and more. The toolkit also provides a programmer's interface for groups who wish to fully customize their site. Several new features are currently under development such as RESTful web services, support for data exchange between Tripal sites for greater sharing, and integration with Galaxy, a package for large-scale scientific workflow analysis. To support data exchange and large-data analysis, Tripal core developers are working to create a national-level cyberinfrastructure to reduce bottlenecks in data transfer.