Web as platform: Why I like web services #223

Earlier today I pointed to nmrdb.org on Friendfeed. A few minutes ago I saw a post by Antony Williams that uses the web services provided by nmrdb.org to provide NMR functionality on Chemspider.

One of the salient features of todays web is a philosphy of services not site; the ability to remix and repurpose functionality. The idea is to repurpose content of functionality that people have developed on different parts of the web. I feel that in the sciences we do not do a very good job of that by and large, preferring local copies or their own versions of well known algos. As a physicist once told me (and I paraphrase), “I am a physicist, I always implement my own version”. Recently, that approach seems to be changing, and this is an excellent example. Of course, we need more web friendly APIs, but that’s also changing, so I remain hopeful of a distributed science web, with content and algorithms available via RESTful APIs for various mashups and distributed pipelines.

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