The Open Science Web

June 6, 2008

David Recordon has a nice, optimistic post about the Open Web. I have long felt that the web is the ultimate platform, and the past few years have only strengthened this opinion, as we make the web more programmable and start leveraging it as a multi-way communication medium (in conjunction with such technologies as XMPP). Much of the tech community is focused on leveraging this web around social networks. My hope is that we in the scientific community can take this to the next level, literally connecting data and information first and then the people.

We are producers and consumers of data. The data lies in our labs, in our papers, in central repositories, on web sites and services; a mishmash of static and dynamic data of all types. We use these data to derive information and hypotheses. Call me conceited but as a scientific community we are probably the stewards of a decent, important, chunk, of the worlds collective intelligence. Except that now we have the ability to bring a distributed collective intelligence to life. What do we need?

An open data web: We are getting there. I am convinced that this is inevitable and more optimistic as time goes on. Not only is the open data web a necessary requirement for us to arrive at the next era in scientific discovery, it will be the primary driving engine. In the sciences, especially the life sciences, the Semantic Web is going to play a key role in how we find data and relationships, not only among pieces of data, but bringing people and knowledge together
Participation: Not just from the early adopters, but the scientific community at large. I am actually less optimistic about this, although I have a feeling that’s just my cynical side. We have an opportunity here folks to really take the next step to solving new problems, leveraging our distributed knowledge
Bursty Work: This is my mantra, but needs participation. In discussions about The BioGang, the issue of critical mass has come up, but if you look at what’s been happening recently, we are slowly taking steps there. A community of software savvy scientists, eventually tapped into wet lab scientists can truly come together for what I hope will be a new era of science. Is it going to happen in the next five years? I seriously doubt it, but we’re just planting seeds at this time. A decade? Now we’re talking. Will be fun to see what happens

Aside: After meeting Matt Wood, discussions with Pawel over time, and seeing the activity over on FriendFeed, I am even more optimistic that we can have an impact as a community of like minded geeks with a diversity of interests and skills.

Technorati Tags: Open Web, Open Science, Bursty Work