Infrastructures are only one part of knowledge sharing

Kaitlin Thaney, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at Scifoo, has a post up at the Science Commons blog where she points to an article on a Cyberinfrastructure for Knowledge Sharing, where John Wilbanks (also from Science Commons) writes about the importance of infrastructure for knowledge sharing. The article focuses on the life sciences, where converting data to knowledge, knowledge that can impact human lives, is a constant challenge.

I completely agree with John when he says that “we need the Web to work as well for science as it does for other areas.” Science, which was instrumental in the mere existence of the web, has fallen back in many ways. While a lot of pharma and biotech companies, academic institutions, etc use the web extensively for science, I have always felt that they have never leveraged it the way it should be, especially in the post Google era. The web is a treasure trove of information, but the scientific part of the web is very poorly developed (just look at most faculty web pages and the poor information on any number of life science topics in Wikipedia).

In a perfect world, we would be able to mind the web for knowledge as I discuss in the embedded slide deck

This search would extend across public repositories, individual web pages, screencast and video sites and of course scholarly publications, but as John points out, applying search to scholarly communication (papers, conference proceedings, etc) is not something that anyone can do. Even if you could, with notable exceptions where are the APIs? Where are the microformats? In all fairness, the last two years, led by Nature and PLoS, have seen a lot of change, but there is still a long way to go to achieve a truly distributed web of scientific knowledge.

John argues for the development of a cyberinfrastructure, something Science Commons is actively involved in. I would go one step further. Scientists have to contribute to this effort as well. No infrastructure can succeed without the producers and users of information. I am not talking about “open science” as such, but in a change in how we embrace the web. This is a lot more than blogging. This is about creating good web sites that disseminate information. This is about developing applications that adhere to standards and are well written. This is about not having double standards (supporting open source software on one hand and protecting data on the other). This is about making it really possible for us to harness our collective knowledge.Those who don’t think businesses can be built on top of this are wrong. My friend Krish has written about Open Source being a platform, not a business model. In much the same way, the cyberinfrastructure in John’s article is a platform. The business models need to be built on top of that (e.g. the Biological Materials Transfer Agreement project). I have always believed that on top of reservoirs of knowledge, information driven scientific businesses can be built effectively.

That was a bit of a ramble. So here is the Twitter version. Infrastructures allow us to share knowledge, and people propogate and use that knowledge. Neither can exist without the other.

Technorati Tags: Science Commons, Cyberinfrastructure, Knowledge, Open Science