  Research papers in the biomedical field come with large and complex data sets
that are shared with the scientific community as unstructured data files via
public data repositories. Examples are sequencing, microarray, and mass
spectroscopy data. The papers discuss and visualize only a small part of the
data, the part that is in its research focus. For labs with similar but not
identical research interests different parts of the data might be important.
They can thus download the full data, preprocess it, integrate it with data
from other publications and browse those parts that they are most interested
in. This requires substantial work as well as programming and analysis
expertise that only few biological labs have on board. In contrast, providing
access to published data over web browsers makes all data visible, allows for
easy interaction with it, and lowers the barrier to working with data from
others.
