Research is by definition an ever changing body of information and data.  Developing software to support research efforts presents constant challenges.  As we try to gain a better understanding of genetics and the underlying biology of diseases such as cancer and alzheimers, there is a great need to tie together data from  disparate groups and make it easily accessible for data analysis.  We need to balance many competing needs:

• Flexibility
• Ease of data entry
• Ensuring high quality and completeness of entered data
• Easy aggregation for data analysis
• Searching for and extracting appropriate data sets
• Flexible display of the data

In this talk I will describe some examples of the software we have developed that balances these needs