iAnn: an event sharing platform for the life sciences

Abstract

Summary: We present iAnn, an open source community-driven platform for dissemination of life science events, such as courses, conferences and workshops. iAnn allows automatic visualisation and integration of customised event reports. A central repository lies at the core of the platform: curators add submitted events, and these are subsequently accessed via web services. Thus, once an iAnn widget is incorporated into a website, it permanently shows timely relevant information as if it were native to the remote site. At the same time, announcements submitted to the repository are automatically disseminated to all portals that query the system. To facilitate the visualization of announcements, iAnn provides powerful filtering options and views, integrated in Google Maps and Google Calendar. All iAnn widgets are freely available.

Availability: http://iann.pro/iannviewer

Contact: manuel.corpas@tgac.ac.uk.

Fig. 1.

Screenshot taken on 1 May 2013 of an iAnn filter showing 48 upcoming events at institutions associated with the GOBLET organization. iAnn, by default, shows a maximum of 300 world-wide life science events. Those at GOBLET-associated organizations are shown here integrated in Google Maps (available at http://goo.gl/LnVbw); an event hosted at The Genome Analysis Centre is clicked, displaying minimal information and a link to the source