From the website of METAGENassist: " To provide a user-friendly, web-based analytical pipeline for comparative metagenomic studies. In particular, METAGENassist allows users to take bacterial census data from different environment sites or different biological hosts, and perform comprehensive multivariate statistical analyses on the data."
Metagenassist performs: 1) taxonomic name normalization; 2) automated taxonomic-to-phenotypic mapping using nearly 20 different phenotypic categories; 3) data integrity/quality checks and 4) data normalization via normalization by constant sum, normalization by a reference feature, sample specific normalization or auto/Pareto/range scaling.
In particular I liked the fact that it reads data generated by mothur, QIIME, MG-RAST, MEGAN, and STAMP.