For years, a central focus of the Center for Integrative Biomedical Computing has been software dissemination. Over the Center's twelve-year history, the infrastructure of CIBC's software dissemination efforts have undergone a radical evolution, with many lessons learned for both users and developers.
Software Dissemination as a Form of Science and Technology Dissemination
|
| The SCIRun/BioPSE Problem-Solving Environment. This system was designed as a 'computational workbench' and represented a new approach to bringing high-end computational tools to the biomedical researcher. |
From the outset, the Center's leadership believed that along with the typical avenues of dissemination, publications, seminars, workshops, conference presentations, etc.‚ software dissemination held a particularly high potential as a means to disseminate the knowledge and advances of the Center and its collaborators. This fundamental belief led to experimentation in a variety of topics, such as software licensing, open source repositories, make systems, operating systems, source code/binary releases, research code versus releasable code, software support, and release schedules.
The origins of our success in developing widely used software tools lie in a set of strategies for algorithm research and software development. One such strategy is the production of software tools with low barriers to entry. This entails the release of documented, tested, complete applications that do not require learning new programming languages or complex, architecture-specific build environments. We also continue to follow an initiative to create a suite of lightweight, stand-alone applications, directed at specific tasks of common interest across a wide set of disciplines. The result is a set of programs, such as Seg3D, with large and growing user bases.
