Earlier this week it was my privilege to chair a tutorial session at Bio IT World on Web 2.0 in science. The term “Web 2.0” has become burdened in recent months with an unfortunate combination of hype and cynicism. But it is the fate of influential ideas to be misunderstood, and despite their slightly nebulous nature, I find that Web 2.0 themes help a lot in thinking about how to get the most out of our new online environment. Lucky for me, then, that we had a dream-team panel of experts to explain what it’s all about.
To kick things off, Tim O’Reilly — Mr. Web 2.0 himself — gave a summary of the concepts, in the process touching on areas in which he sees them applying to science, such as open access. He also talked about his habit of watching the alpha geeks and his astonishing (to me) track record in identifying and articulating emerging technological trends, including the emergence of the web and open-source software.
Next, Jim Ostell of the NCBI (hosts of what must be the biggest bioinformatics hub on earth) described the state of the art in biomedical web applications and how these already include some Web 2.0-like features (e.g., open APIs and the concept of the “productotype”, a robust prototype application). He also talked about NCBI Bookshelf and described how online books can go beyond the printed page, for example by using animated figures. Jim rounded off by describing some really nice querying and visualisation tools available to study influenza, from anti-viral compounds in PubChem to viral genome analysis.
Third up was Nature’s own Declan Butler. He started off by talking about the relative reluctance of scientists to embrace Web 2.0-like activities such as blogging. Declan is, of course, a keen blogger himself. He believes that blogs could become a useful supplement to more traditional forms of scientific communication such as journals and conferences. (I agree.) The second half of Declan’s talk was about mashups, focusing on the amazing work that he’s done pulling together data relevant to avian flu and making it available as overlays for Google Earth. His demos not only look fabulous, they have real scientific value and might even end up saving lives. This is scientific techno-geekery at its most sublime. 🙂
I brought up the rear with some examples of ways in which Web 2.0 thinking has infiltrated Nature. (And its influence on our online activities has really been profound.) First I talked about open APIs, starting with our RSS feeds, which we have enriched with all sorts of metadata to make them a kind of machine-readable catalogue of our content rather than just a simple alerting service. But even enriched RSS can take you only so far, so I also presented a new idea, called OTMI, for exposing information about the contents of an article in a form suitable for indexing and text-mining — more about this in another post. I then went on to talk about ‘architectures of participation’ — web sites that get better for everyone the more people use them. I described our various blogs and Connotea, our social bookmarking service for clinicians and scientists. I rounded off with a brief description of some forthcoming services: Nature Protocols, which will be a peer-reviewed journal but also a collaborative website, and Nature Network Boston, an online social space for scientists that will be launching in May.
There were loads of good questions during the Q&A that ensued, and from where I sat the room seemed to be packed out, so many thanks to all of those who came along and contributed to what I think was a stimulating session.
I have slides from some of the talks, but a technical problem is preventing me from uploading these now, so I’ll do it later and post a comment below when I’ve done so.
Update (26/4/06): Here are slides from Jim (PPT PDF), Declan (PPT PDF) and me (PPT PDF).
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