The Collective Molecular Environment application (C-ME) is helping The Scripps Research Institute fight the war on cancer. The C-ME is a Smart Client application for SharePoint 2007. It facilitates research collaboration through SharePoint 2007 and allows the user to visualize their research in 2D and 3D.
The application is a Collaborative Client application where the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is use to view cancer in 2D & 3D at cellular, molecular and atomic levels. With its annotation capability it allows the user to attach cancer research in the form of documents, SharePoint discussions or URLs to the exact selected spot on the cell, molecule or atom. It leverages the collaborative environment of SharePoint 2007 and provides data in the context of the project not in the context of its storage. C-ME is a feature rich application that allows users to drag and drop data into the context of the project. The WPF Smart client then handles the display of the underlying storage. The use of Windows Presentation Foundation allowed the InterKnowlogy team to build the CME in a fraction of the time it would have taken using earlier methods. The proof of concept prototype took only six weeks to build. Before the .NET Framework, it would have taken twenty developers two years to build this application.
Development on the project started in March 2006 and Dr.Kuhn was evaluating an early version of the tool about two weeks later. “This was important because it allowed us to have a very dynamic development process,” Dr. Kuhn says. “Every two weeks, they would bring us a new version that was just an order of magnitude better than the previous one. It was just unbelievable.”
One member of the team, developer Kevin Kennedy, built the control mechanism for the 3-D image viewer in two weeks. The team built a viewer on the .NET Framework 3.0 with Windows Presentation Foundation, and the viewer allows cancer researchers to look at these 2-D or 3-D images. Then, with just a right-click, they can attach their notes, create Word documents, attach other research or another picture, or point to a URL that is any specific point on the rendering.
Because Office SharePoint Server 2007 creates a central repository for data in almost any format, researchers are not limited in the ways they organize their data. Being able to link multiple kinds of data to an image of a single molecule, for example, makes it easier to organize experiments, collect and distribute results, and speed up the process of uncovering deeper knowledge from various experiments. “Because it’s SharePoint, every entity, every blood sample or lab report, can become its own site,All the information about that entity can be collected and retrieved—from one point.”
The volume of data created at Scripps Research is immense. “They have terabytes of data spread over numerous networks. There was no way they could find all that data, let alone link one piece of research to another. Because everything’s now housed in the [Office] SharePoint 2007 site, Peter Kuhn and his team 
can search all their data. It’s all together, all linked. That makes their job dramatically easier.”
In addition, because the CME is built on Windows Vista, it’s easy and safe to allow access to researchers around the world. “We run the application on a secure server, and we control the access we give to people under Active Directory® service,” says Dr.Kuhn.
The C-ME project and solution is extremely successful on many fronts and has been covered in the world-wide press. Because of its success, specialized versions of the software are being developed for many industries including a few of the more famous heart research organizations, life science corporations, and manufacturing firms. In fact, InterKnowlogy has built an AutoCAD© version of the solution that allows you to annotate on 2D/3D AutoCAD© DWF drawings and persist those annotations in SharePoint 2007 for collaboration.
C-ME paper in the PLoS One Journal
Technologies used
Windows Presentation Foundation
SharePoint 2007
Visual Studio 2005
Visual C#
Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0