I think that the lack of top down organization in scientific data dissemination is to large extent a good thing and something that will continue to evolve in this way because of the low barriers to doing so. A primary reason that I am reading your blog and engaging in a dialogue with you is that you did not seek the blessings of a third party to review your content and organize it into a standard format. I came across it either through a recommendation of a like-minded information producer or through some type of general purpose search engine for the blogosphere. In the same way someone searching for a protocol to distill phenylacetaldehyde yesterday came across a report from my lab via Google that was still being perfected but contained hopefully useful cautionary information: http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/Exp037 If someone creates a database to organize some of this information then lets duplicate it but there is no point in waiting for the organizational system to publish and share. Now monetizing is a interesting question in this environment - I suspect that people are going to be less and less willing to pay just for information.
Deepak Singh
· 3 years ago
You're point is well taken. However, the reason we are being able to communicate via this blog, and the fact that you could come across it, is that there is a framework which allows you to do so. Information itself should be distributed across the web and certainly not centralized. Nor should anyone need permission to publish. However, to make the kind of access possible that todays web provides requires the development of some standards and vocabularies. It is the latter that is needed, but it can't happen unless some of the key organizations come together to maintain and agree to those standards.
On the issue of monetization, people are already less willing to pay for information itself.
Jean-Claude Bradley
· 3 years ago
Deepak - the framework that you use for your blog is the same that we use for our blog to disseminate scientific information. But what I meant by a lack of top down organization is that you have complete freedom to communicate any way you wish. If you had to wait for a standard vocabulary to express your thoughts you would not have been able to do so.
Deepak Singh
· 3 years ago
I don't quite agree. The framework provided by my blog software and the WWW, i.e. XHTML, CSS, PHP, is what makes this blog possible. The content is mine, but to disseminate and share this content, there is a framework. My argument is not for the content, but a means to allow the content to be indexed and search. I am open to ideas on other ways to do this, but I haven't been able to think of any. To some extent, we seem to be talking semantics here. Perhaps our definition of framework is not the same or something along those lines.
smeutaw
· 3 years ago
This conversation reminds me of one I had yesterday. My colleague was very excited about a $500k product that would make "IT support unneccesary!" I asked - is it a software-as-a-service platform over the web? He said, oh no, it's a server preloaded with a proprietary algorithm. I asked who would be taking the data from the box and integrating it into our user platform, who would be doing maintenence and service, upgrades, backups and all that on the "box." He sort of sheepishly went "Oh...." Alot of the technological framework of today's web, Web 2.0 and the emerging semantic web are all built on technologies largely invisible to users (thankfully!). But somewhere, there are W3C committees, GooglePlexes, Cisco engineers making the whole thing possible. Here's to the Plumbers of the Internet and may they be semantically empowered someday soon!
Deepak Singh
· 3 years ago
I was hoping you'd read this post. I am convinced that the future of data is some form of loose structure, which will allow indexing services and semantic engines to query the web. In addition, giving a service like postgenomic a plug, memes can be tracked more easily and the likes. In fact the latter is an excellent example of why we need some structure in our data (microformats).
smeutaw
· 3 years ago
Did you see the article in BioIT: Shaping a Web That Better Serves Humanity by Catherine Varmazis? It describes the formation of a Web Sciences Research Initiative out of MIT to do research into web technologies but also the cognitive/user aspects of how to mine the web for information. I agree with you that this is probably the "value add" part of the web's aggregate content.
Deepak Singh
· 3 years ago
I read other versions of that article. I presume you are referring to the Tim Berners-Lee led initiative.
We are a long way from maximizing what we can do with loosely distributed networks of information. Google and the likes were just the start. The "search" is only the beginning :)
Pedro Beltrao
· 3 years ago
I am compiling data on known phosphorylation sites in human proteins. Yesterday I went trough a paper that had in supplementary materials a list of phosphorylated sites linked to proteins via IDs. They used 3 different ID types in the same field that I had to parse to my own favorite human id. I then downloaded a database that was at least well formated (in XML) but I still had to match their own ID to the one I was interested by blasting the protein sequences ... I sill have at least two more databases to go.
How I wish that there were a more standardized form of communicating scientific data. It is more important that we spend resources thinking of what to do with the information than on how to get it all together.
Deepak Singh
· 3 years ago
Pedro
Your last sentence should be framed and sent to every life scientist in the world. If we don't do something about it soon, we will only be hurting ourselves.
All Comments
If someone creates a database to organize some of this information then lets duplicate it but there is no point in waiting for the organizational system to publish and share. Now monetizing is a interesting question in this environment - I suspect that people are going to be less and less willing to pay just for information.
On the issue of monetization, people are already less willing to pay for information itself.
We are a long way from maximizing what we can do with loosely distributed networks of information. Google and the likes were just the start. The "search" is only the beginning :)
How I wish that there were a more standardized form of communicating scientific data. It is more important that we spend resources thinking of what to do with the information than on how to get it all together.
Your last sentence should be framed and sent to every life scientist in the world. If we don't do something about it soon, we will only be hurting ourselves.