New business models for life science content
April 28, 2008
Let me start of by pointing everyone to the standard disclaimer.
Now to the good stuff. I have blogged about NextBio in the past. A couple of weeks about I was on the site and noticed that I could use the search engine without having to log in and get some pretty interesting results fast (well presented, well laid out, etc). I also registered and got an account for enhancements to the search experience. So when I got an advance copy of a press release announcing the formal public launch of the NextBio search engine. From the release
Using NextBio, any researcher or clinician can search the world’s public life sciences data and literature - over 10,000 experiments, 16 million articles, and literally billions of data points. Moreover, users can import their own experimental data into the NextBio search engine, share it with the community, and collaborate with others as never before
The release offers more details. There are over a billion data points, tens of thousands of study results and millions of scientific articles. There is a really neat autocomplete feature. Perhaps most importantly one can make correlations across six species, comparing animal models to human data.
Here are some screenshots. What I like most about the service is just the look and feel, very “Googley” if I might say.
For me the more interesting part is the business model. The NextBio model is essentially the freemium model that so many have advocated. They offer a quality free search engine, but revenues are going to be driven by commercial services, both hosted search and local installs. Transinsight, with GoPubMed, is doing something similar albeit not quite at this scale.
I like the direction life science content is taking. It’s only going to be better for science and for the companies working in this space
Hopefully I will get a chance to see the presentation tomorrow here at Bio-IT World. Check the site out, I would love to hear what all of you think.
Further readingh
Searching biological information at NextBio
Technorati Tags: NextBio, Search, Biological Content
Some companies just don’t get it
April 17, 2008
Via Twine I found out about Anatomy Lens. Here is how it is described
Anatomy Lens is a search engine that helps scientists hone in on PubMed articles most relevant to their research. Users enter anatomy terms, MeSH terms, and biological processes as search keywords. Anatomy Lens is more precise and has better recall than text search. For example, for the query Alzheimer’s, brain, neuron development, Anatomy Lens will match Alzheimer’s articles that discuss dendrite development in the hippocampus, whereas a standard text search will only find articles containing the queried keywords explicitly and might also find articles that are unrelated (such as articles about neuron development in the spine).
Sounds a bit like GoPubMed. All excited I click on Try It Now even though there is a “registration required” link right next to it. And what do I get, an alphaWorks Services Use Agreement. So, if someone less liable to get irritated with companies that don’t get the web tries out Anatomy Lens, please let me know if it is any good. I refuse to try it (Many Eyes, which is great also lost me as a user for that reason). IBM, I have always liked your hardware and research. Surely you can do better.
Image via Wikipedia
Technorati Tags: IBM, Search, PubMed, Idiotic
Is the Semantic Web going mainstream?
March 13, 2008
Yahoo’s announcement that they are expanding their open search platform to include support for semantic web standards is big in many ways. For one, it brings the Semantic Web (and microformats) into the mainstream. Google might follow as well (which would really do the trick).
Here is an interesting thought. Given that many life science resources are available in Semantic Web formats, does that mean that when Yahoo or Google index semantic content, that the relationships captured in Uniprot (for example) or maybe even Freebase, get indexed and available via search? How effectively will we be able to traverse graphs and relationships? Nova Spivack seems more than happy to open up the content of Twine into the Yahoo index. The following is actually an ideal situation
If Yahoo and possibly Google make search better by indexing all sorts of metadata, there is then an even larger opportunity to help users do useful things with that metadata after they find it, and to create their own metadata so their stuff can be found. This is where Twine fits in. We don’t believe ordinary Webmasters are going to write microformats or RDF by hand. Even hard-core Semantic Web researchers don’t do that. Ultimately end-users need user-friendly services that do this for them automatically, or at least make it easier to do. Twine not only does this, but provides a place where users can collect, organize, share and discover other interesting content around their interests.
Read Paul Miller’s ZDNet post for a cautious view. Both he and Nova point out some of the underlying dangers and why we need to proceed thoughtfully.
Technorati Tags: Semantic Web, Search, Yahoo, Twine, Freebase
The web cannot be indexed?!!!
March 10, 2008
On TWiT 135, in a pretty interesting, and somewhat troubling, discussion on the future of Wikipedia, Leo Laporte quoted Roger McNamee as saying that Google is dead and the web cannot be indexed. In his thinking, the future of the web lies in expert content, vertical wikis and the like. Jason Calacanis, who was on the call naturally agreed, since his project Mahalo, falls into the same category. While I admit that projects like Mahalo and the Wiki search paradigms that Jimmy Wales has been talking about have their place, I cannot agree with that worldview.
In my opinion, a web that cannot be indexed, and cannot provide the backend framework upon which information discovery is based, yes even the “expert” variety, is a web that is going backward. Whether the future lies with Google, or some giant global graph, or something that no one has thought about, to think that humans can scale like machines is absurd. We need that indexed web as the backbone on top of which we can provide specific services and build a circle of trust. Any attempts to derail that are shortsighted. I would go so far as to say that those who have this viewpoint don’t really understand the web and its potential.
What do you think?
Further reading
ReadWriteWeb on Topicle, which is building on top of the indexed web
Technorati Tags: Search, Wikipedia, Mahalo, Google
Yahoo: Living up to the talk on Hadoop
February 20, 2008
I admit that I am a “Google guy”. i.e. I like the companies products and their quirkyness. I have also long abandoned a number of core Yahoo products (IM, mail, MyYahoo, etc) due to their design choices and a general preference for most things Goog. However, Yahoo holds a soft spot in my heart, partly due to their history, and the fact that some close friends of mine worked there till recently, but mostly for their open source/*Nix ethos, their ownership of flickr and del.icio.us (two of THE best web properties out there), and for their support of projects like Hadoop (and for Jeremy Zawodny, who writes one of the best blogs in the business).
Yesterday, amidst all the Microsoft morass, Yahoo gave us a picture of what they have done with Hadoop, in some sense a necessity given what Google is doing with MapReduce, but an excellent example of a company making good technology choices. Some of the stats for their new webmap are astounding.
I wonder what it would take to create a map of the scientific web, or subsets of the scientific web and will anyone ever do it.
Yahoo is also hosting the Hadoop Summit in March
