Figure 7

A Use-case Diagram for maxdLoad2 and maxdBrowse. The 'system administrator' is the individual in charge of maintaining the lab's database and web server. The 'lab scientist (data provider)' is typically someone who does a lot of microarray experiments and manages his experiments using maxdLoad2. The 'lab scientist (data consumer)' is typically someone who may not perform as many microarray experiments, and may not even work in a microarray facility, but is interested in the data and could use maxdBrowse or maxdLoad2 for its access. The statistician would be interested in retrieving data and meta-data for analysis, and may prefer to access the data programmatically either with scripts using maxdBrowse on the command-line or via its SOAP interface. The 'bioinformatician (stand-in)' may be involved at any level with any of these activities.