Jealous of Geo (no not gene expression)

In my day job, I get to see a lot of innovative geo-related software and services, and the O’Reilly Radar does a great job of tracking innovations in this space. SimpleGeo, WeoGeo, ESRI, Loki, Cloudmade, Quantum GIS, GeoCommons, etc are just some examples of companies/organizations/open source projects doing very interesting things around geospatial data of all kinds. There are a number of good open source efforts around geo-data and visualization, and I am almost certain I am missing a ton. These toolkits allow people to do interesting things.

So where am I going with this? Somehow there seems to be a lack of similar interesting things with scientific data. Admittedly that is a gross generalization, but outside of things like Rich Apodaca’s many projects, there don’t seem to be that many API driven, mashup oriented scientific applications out there. One would think there is more interest and more potential users of scientific data than geospatial data, or maybe I am just too biased. Mapping data is more general and interpretation is somewhat more simple. Geo-data is easier to mash into other data, and with all the Maps APIs out there (and Google‘s role in making Maps so accessible should not be minimized either), it is no wonder that there is so much interest in mapping. But I digress. What I want to see is a lot of apps and services around scientific data, and not just targeted at other scientists, but developers in general. I think in the sciences we tend to think only other scientists can handle scientific data, but there are enough smart people out there who, given the right data sources, can do some pretty cool things with data. I wonder if the problem is that we first need to have a science data platform. I don’t think our current data sources do a good job of being a platform for people to build upon.

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