Examples

Download example user personas from the iPlant web site professionalization project.

Trait Evolution Working Group

Draft of user personas. Names taken from here so as not to offend. Personas are arranged in rough order of increasing informatics skill.

• Ana: Has a very large dataset of plant morphological traits and wants to look at correlation between flower size and fruit size. She's been told by a reviewer that she has to use independent contrasts. She does not create phylogenies, nor know very much about using comparative methods, but she just wants to get the reviewer off her back and show that the results from contrasts are the same as using raw species values. Most of her observations are for species (though the taxonomy on some of the herbarium specimens she used might not be up-to-date) but a few are for genera. [problems: upload data, get tree, deal with changed species names, deal with data mapping to genera rather than species, use independent contrasts, have safe or adaptive defaults]
• Bill: Wants to use the plant c-dna size database to investigate whether genome size changes in plants happened more early or late in evolution. He knows he needs a tree but doesn't have one. [problems: use database, get tree, use tree-stretching method]
• Claudette: Has moderate-sized binary trait dataset, also DNA sequences for three phylogenetically-informative genes. She wants to recover a tree and use that to see which pairs of her binary traits are correlated, but only has a very slow laptop on which to run analyses. [problems: construct tree from sequence data (not our group's mandate, but a use case overlap), upload tree and data, use Pagel 1994 method. This user only needs a small tree, but would stil be an audience for iPlant tools]
• Danny: Got a tree for his clade using info pulled from GenBank and run on the CIPRES portal and character information (AT-bias). He usually uses R scripts for running comparative methods, but keeps running into memory problems on his Mac Pro. He'd like to plot reconstructed AT-bias from nodes versus node depth in R. [problems: upload tree, upload data, data output, interaction with external software]
• Erika: Just invented a new comparative method (a multi-state version of BISSE). Unfortunately, it's impractical to run on desktop computers if there are over 50 taxa (it takes over a week). She'd like to have the iPlant discovery environment host her method. [problem: adding new methods]
• Fred: Wants to create a mashup that will combine the current best plant phylogeny with the current best locality information from gbif to dynamically estimate phylogenetically-informed niche models for each species and map these on maps of current and future climate. [problem: api, adding new methods, connecting taxon names between different sources, updating the plant tree]
• Grace: _________