TUTORIAL: BioLegato Overview

BioLegato is best thought of as a program that runs other programs. BioLegato is the primary graphic interface for launching programs in BIRCH. For each program, BioLegato provides a menu that lets you set program parameters, launch the program, and view the output. BioLegato takes care of all of the background details, such as translating files from one format into another. In many cases, output also goes to a new BioLegato window, making it possible to do ad hoc pipelining. This is one of the most powerful aspects of BioLegato, because it means that you can usually run additional programs using the output of one program as the input of the next. In contrast, most browser-based applications display output in a human-readable form that allows no further analysis by other programs.

How do I use BioLegato? - A brief introduction to how the BioLegato interface works.	One program; many data types - A growing number of BioLegato interfaces for many types of data.
How does BioLegato work? - Everything that BioLegato does is accomplished by running external programs	Pipelining using BioLegato - combining many tools to accomplish a complex task.

Historical note: BioLegato was inspired by the GDE program of Steven Smith, which later evolved into the GCG SeqLab interface. GDE was a multiple sequence alignment editor that ran external programs. We have tried to generalize that basic concept to create a general purpose GUI, that ultimately, will be able to work with many different types of data, even beyond the domain of biolgy.