Annual Scientific Report 2015

Web Development
The Web Development team designs, develops and maintains the internal and
external websites relating to both EMBL-EBI’s core activities and affiliated
websites. We are a central consultancy for web development and User Experience
Design (UXD) at the institute.
Our team maintains the global EMBL-EBI website,
its underlying content database, the EMBL-EBI
Intranet and training portals. We help develop and
support several ancillary web portals and services,
including BioMedBridges, 1000genomes, INSDC,
ProteomeXchange and HGNC. We also provide
front-end user experience (UX), web design and
development for the CTTV Target Validation platform.
Our team supports web developers throughout
EMBL-EBI by providing Web guidelines, templates,
style sheets and training as well as support in Drupal,
JavaScript and other key web technologies. We also
offer considerable expertise in UXD, an area of strategic
importance for EMBL-EBI services.
Major achievements
Events and projects
EMBL-EBI offers a wide variety of events, seminars
and talks that are held both onsite and at host institutes
throughout the year. In 2015 our team worked with
several teams to integrate the various diverse eventmanagement
systems into a single, centralised portal for
announcing events on our own website and potentially
those of partner organisations. The new system avoids
duplication of information and effort, makes events
more discoverable and presents them in a number
of attractive ways. The Events Portal project was a
collaborative effort to harmonise and update event
information creation, presentation and dissemination,
and on the technical side involved the merging of
three Drupal 6 sites into a single Drupal 7 instance.
Information pertaining to events, people, locations
and funders is now centralised in the EMBL-EBI
content database and integrated with the EDAM Topics
ontology, making it easier to tag events consistently.
Working with the Training team, we completely
redesigned and modernised the training programme
webpages, presenting users with clear information
and dynamic tools to find events of interest easily. The
Training and Events projects together resulted in a
vastly improved presentation of events, seminars and
courses, reduced technical debt and enriched our central
content database with ontology terms, which supports
the further integration of related content types.
Global website
In 2015 we reengineered the global EMBL-EBI website
to be responsive on mobile devices. Although the
majority of our web traffic is from desktop machines,
mobile device usage has increased considerably and
the need for optimised display on various devices
undeniable. We retrofitted the existing site to a
responsive design using UX principles, modern design
approaches and analytics. This retrofit was a stop-gap
measure; the,larger project to improve the backend
will be initiated in 2016. This will involve redeveloping
the site to use a responsive framework that can also be
extended to other groups and teams at EMBL-EBI. In
collaboration with External Relations and as part of the
newly formed Web Content Committee, we intend this
redesign process to also enhance the user experience
when navigating between the EMBL-EBI website and its
services, ELIXIR and EMBL.
CTTV
Members of our team working on Open Targets
(formerly the CTTV) in 2015 went from outlining
a database schema and roughly designing a website
on paper to launching a fully functional Target
Validation Platform, which had 8000 visits in its first
month of operation. The team has taken a UX-driven,
agile, iterative approach to engage with stakeholders
and potential users to design, implement and test
functionality, constantly refining and improving the
platform. They carried out extensive user research to
identify the needs of potential platform users working
in both academia and the pharmaceutical industry,
then designed and implemented the platform to be
as intuitive, informative and responsive as possible
with clear use cases and goals. Following a series of
test releases, the platform was fully launched to the
public in December 2015. In addition, our team moved
the platform, Open Targets website and intranet to an
Embassy Cloud workspace.
Technical Services Cluster Portal
The Technical Services Cluster (TSC) supports all
EMBL-EBI services and resources as well as internal
staff and their projects. We built a dedicated information
portal in 2015 to make it easier for our internal users
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2015 EMBL-EBI Annual Scientific Report