CompaGB is a framework providing facilities to evaluate and compare Genome Browsers functionalities. The methodology is inspired by the Qualification and Selection of Open Source software ( QSOS ) method, which is designed to qualify, select and compare free and open source software in an objective, traceable and argued way.
CompaGB (http://genome.jouy.inra.fr/CompaGB) helps the scientific community to
(1) choose a genome browser that would better fit their particular project,
(2) visualize features comparatively with easily accessible formats, such as tables or radar plots and
(3) perform their own evaluation against the defined criteria.
It is an open project, anyone in the community can perform new evaluations as well as concurrent evaluations of already evaluated softwares.
At the beginning of this project we came to the conclusion that we wouldn’t be able to meet the requirement of 3 critical factors:
(1) having a exhaustive number of softwares evaluated,
(2) having evaluations up to date with software’s releases and
(3) providing a broad representation of the views from the different communities of users. Our answer to this was to make CompaGB an open framework in which anyone interested can participate.
