Patent ID: 8239455

Claim:
A system for collaborative management of scientific data comprising: a central server comprising a plurality of collaborative engines; wherein the central server is adapted to receive information from a plurality of local servers and coordinate information transfer between the plurality of local servers and between the local servers and the central server wherein the plurality of collaborative engines comprises: a metadata engine adapted to receive metadata indicative of experiment data from the plurality of local servers, store the metadata, and index the stored metadata; a schema engine adapted to receive one or more schemas from one or more of the plurality of local servers, store the one or more schemas received from the one or more of the plurality of local servers, transmit the one or more schemas received from the one or more plurality of local servers to the plurality of local servers, and facilitate collaborative authoring of the one or more schemas by users at different ones of the plurality of local servers; and a tag engine adapted to receive one or more free tags associated with the experiment data from the plurality of local servers, store the one or more free tags received from the plurality of local servers, and to automatically associate semantic tags with the experiment data by retrieving the semantic tags from a standardized scientific or biomedical vocabulary to provide a repository for free tags defined at the plurality of local servers and a cached vocabulary repository for previously retrieved semantic tags from the standardized scientific or biomedical vocabulary, to allow users at the plurality of local servers to look up tags from the repository of free tags and the cached vocabulary repository, and to update shared classification data by addition of free tags and/or semantic tags to the experiment data and exchange of the tags between the plurality of local servers; wherein the central server and each of the plurality of local servers comprise computing devices.