:: Motivation ::

Like many other areas of active progress, the biomedical sciences are facing an increasing information overload. It is becoming progressively more difficult to see through the multitude of data, theories, projects, etc. in order to find the best way to move forward. The problem manifests itself on different levels: an individual researcher, a research group, a research institute, a scientific field, etc. It is clear that to resolve this problem the information has to be better organized, in order to improve its search and analysis. However, if the information is well-organized on the level of an individual researcher, this organization can then propagate through the more general levels. iPad's goal is to help researchers organize their information in a way that is, on the one hand, useful for all the organizational levels including the researchers, and on the other hand, as simple and effortless as possible.

The reason a new system needs to be created is that none of the available software systems have been widely adopted by researchers. The existing systems have one of the following two problems: either they make the data entry overly constraining and difficult (by using complex forms) or, more commonly, they do not offer a sufficiently useful functionality for organizing information (the information is entered in a traditional document form). However, the novel technology of "structured documents" (see below) allows us to combine the best of both worlds: the usefulness of the structure provided by traditional forms and the ease of use and flexibility provided by traditional documents.