About N-Browse

N-Browse is an interactive graphical browser for biological networks. The goal of N-Browse is to provide a simple, intuitive, and dynamic interface to molecular interaction data that allows biologists to take advantage of the rapidly expanding body of functional genomics data.
The N-Browse server at NYU currently provides access to a variety of large-scale functional genomic datasets from several species. Users can also upload their own data for integrated browsing with publicly available datasets.
The N-Browse GUI (graphical user interface) runs as a desktop webstart application that launches from your web browser and uses a client-server system to provide network data to the user from a server-side database. It uses JDBC to talk to a MySQL database with the optimized NBrowse schema. There is a DataAdapter interface (which the JDBC adapter implements) that allows developers to hook up their datasource to NBrowse.

N-Browse uses a flexible data model that is optimized for retrieval and display of network data. While it was designed specifically with biological data in mind, the concept behind N-Browse is to create a "Generic Network Browser" capable of handling any type of network-based data and associated information. The N-Browse client-server package is designed for portability, with the goal that multiple independent N-Browse systems could be set up to provide graphical interfaces for network-based data from different data sources.