Poster by: Saravanan Dayalan, Informatics Group, Metabolomics Australia, Bio21 Molecular Science and Biotechnology Institute, University of Melbourne.

Metabolomics Australia (MA) is a government funded national centre for metabolomics services within Bioplatforms Australia Ltd., an NCRIS capability 5.1 investment, made up of five Nodes (University of Melbourne, The Australian Wine and Research Institute Ltd, University of Western Australia, Murdoch University and University of Queensland) that are spread across four states. We present ongoing work towards designing and developing a new data and information management system that will support operations of Metabolomics Australia in terms of:
• customer services workflow;
• internal collaborations;
• effective management of scientific data generated by analytical instrumentation; and
• general business workflow.

Metabolomics Australia Data And Sample management system (MADAS) is designed to be a web based Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) that integrates the working of geographically dispersed MA Nodes. The Australian Bioinformatics Facility, funded as part of NCRIS 5.1 Bioinformatics Informatics, is leading the development of MADAS. MADAS incorporates two parts, a customer management/business workflow system for MA and the data management solution. This is achieved by the three major modules of MADAS:
• User Management Module, which manages both MA staff and Client details and the interactions between them;
• Sample Management Module, that defines and controls the workflow of biological samples submitted by external Clients for analysis; and
• Data Management Module, which manages scientific data produced by operations of MA.

Three important challenges faced in implementing a new data and workflow management system for a geographically distributed virtual organization are:
• To decide between a commercial solution versus developing an in-house solution versus using an open source solution,
• Need for an interim solution and
• Gathering requirements in a multi-site environment.

Here, we present the advantages, disadvantages and recommendations of the different approaches for each of these challenges.

MADAS is being developed as an open source solution under the GPL License and hence once complete, both its source code and documentation would be freely available.