EXPLANe: An Extensible Framework for Poster Annotation with Mobile Devices

Summary: Scientific posters tend to be brief, unstructured, and generally unsuitable for communication beyond a poster session. This paper describes EXPLANe, a framework for annotating posters using optical text recognition and web services on mobile devices. EXPLANe is demonstrated through an interface to the MyVariant.info variant annotation web services, and provides users a list of biological information linked with genetic variants (as found via extracted RSIDs from annotated posters). This paper delineates the architecture of the application, and includes results of a five-part evaluation we conducted. Researchers and developers can use the existing codebase as a foundation from which to generate their own annotation tabs when analyzing and annotating posters.