Open

LabKey Server combines the accessibility of a web application with the reliability of a relational database, all built in an open source project using open source components.

In addition, LabKey Server offers well-defined application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable programmers to customize their applications using a variety of scripting languages—allowing them to leverage functionality already built into the platform.

Adaptable

LabKey Server continues  to evolve as it has been successfully adapted to a diverse range of disciplines, including proteomics, flow cytometry, and observational study management.

Developers and users have found that building applications around the LabKey Server platform leads to fewer defects, faster and less expensive customization, and lower project risk.

Flexible

Organizing research data demands a flexible approach that can store and retrieve data in a format appropriate to its size, structure and intended use. LabKey Server offers a spectrum of data management tools, all integrated into a unified interface:

• Secure, web-based file share for uploading, cataloging and downloading files
• Adaptable tools for importing files into LabKey’s integrated SQL database
• Integrated pipeline for data types that need processing prior to importing

Reliable

Researchers need to ensure their data is reliable: current, complete, and error-free. LabKey's assay framework provides a set of customizable data definition and collection tools designed to achieve this, including:

• Efficient data entry to minimize redundant entries.
• Metadata collection to store essential properties about the data—for example, sample identifier or protocol followed.
• Data quality checks at both field level and across an entire data set, as well as free-form annotations and discussions of data elements.

Comprehensive

LabKey Server not only stores a huge range of data types, but also helps you find the data you need and relate it to other data.

Interact with data through dynamic web-based components—like the Data Grid, which lets you filter, sort, join, and export virtually any tabular data, or the Study Navigator for viewing and aggregating clinical data and lab diagnostic results.

You can also perform internet-style indexed searches over both text documents and structured data in the SQL database.

Accessible

LabKey Server gives you access to data with familiar tools and languages. For example, R language users can load the Rlabkey package to explore data  relationships, read or write data, or run R scripts on LabKey Server itself (a feature often used for showing graphs of data sets).

SAS™ users will find similar read and write access, as well as the ability to “attach” a SAS table and query it as if it were stored in LabKey. LabKey also supports Microsoft Excel as an import source and export target.

Secure

LabKey Server is built around a simple but powerful security model— share the right data with the right people.

Users log in with secure credentials and administrators authorize access to data within their projects. Common sets of permissions—known as "roles"—make assigning specific levels of access straightforward.

All logins and permission changes can be tracked through LabKey’s auditing system.

Scalable

Researchers are collaborating more than ever to accelerate progress on specific diseases. Such collaboration demands a centralized data strategy, where geographically dispersed labs share results and insights prior to publication. The common database—called a “repository”—must be able to handle large volumes of data and a growing number of participating labs.

LabKey Server is such a repository, with a robust database architecture and experienced team of developers ensuring the scalability needed to support large research consortia.