A Meta-model Guided Expression Engine

Data acquisition and handling is known to be one of the most severe technical barriers in (bio-)medical research. In order to counter this problem, we created a generic data acquisition and managing system which can be set up for the given domain of application without the need for programming- or database-skills. The user definitions of the domain data structures are stored into an abstract meta data-model and allow the automatic creation of data-input and -managing interfaces. In order to enable the user to define complex search queries on the data or derive new data out of already existing, a meta-model-guided expression engine was developed. Grammatical and structural meta-data are interwoven in order to provide support in expression generation to the domain expert.