Portal Introduction

The main goal of the ViroLab Portal creation was to equip non-technical users with convenient and useful tool for running experiments and using applications. Most important tasks were connected with identifying (authenticating) users, granting them authorisation or revoking them rights to run the experiments, and providing a means for monitoring running experiments and downloading results to local users' machines.

Due to the fact that experiment users, notably virologists and epidemiologists, are the user target group for the ViroLab Portal, it is especially suited for non-technical users. It serves as a single point of access to several applications. In other words, the Portal is the main entry to all functionalities provided by the ViroLab Virtual Laboratory (VL). It allows easy and convenient way of performing such scientific tasks as retrieving virus genotypic information from remote databases or finding out the resistance of the virus based on HIV nucleotide.

Portal implementation for ViroLab is based on a popular open-source portlet-based web portal framework - GridSphere and following features have been provided to end users:
a) Distributed security;
b) Support for multiple user institutions;
c) Single Sign-on (SSO);
d) Support for Flash and AJAX portlets;
e) Support for multiple operating systems and web browsers.

Application portlets

At the moment there are eight application portlets deployed to the portal: Drug Ranking System, Database Browser, BAC, Literature Mining, QUaTRO, EMI. To learn how to use each application please read corresponding User Manual listed below.