[CAnet - news] Open data and open APIs enable scientific mashups

For more information on this item please visit the CANARIE CA*net 4 Optical
Internet program web site at http://www.canarie.ca/canet4/library/list.html
-------------------------------------------

[Thanks to Richard Ackerman for this blog -- BSA]

http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/2006/01/open_data_and_o.html


 Open data and open APIs enable scientific mashups

    Will 2006 be the year of the mashup? Originally used to describe the
mixing together of musical tracks, the term now refers to websites that
weave data from different sources into a new service. They are becoming
increasingly popular, especially for plotting data on maps, covering
anything from cafés offering wireless Internet access to traffic conditions.
And advocates say they could fundamentally change many areas of science — if
researchers can be persuaded to share their data.

    ...

    The biodiversity community is one group working to develop such
services. To demonstrate the principle, Roderic Page of the University of
Glasgow, UK, built what he describes as a "toy" — a mashup called
Ispecies.org (http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/ispecies). If you type
in a species name it builds a web page for it showing sequence data from
GenBank, literature from Google Scholar and photos from a Yahoo image
search. If you could pool data from every museum or lab in the world, "you
could do amazing things", says Page.

    ...

    Nature has created its own mashup, which integrates data on avian-flu
outbreaks from the WHO and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization into
Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/) (you will need to download Google
Earth  before opening the mashup file). The result is a useful snapshot, but
illustrates the problem. As the data are not in public databases that can be
directly accessed by software, we had to request them from the relevant
agencies, construct a database and compute them into Google Earth. If the
data were available in a machine-readable format, the mashup could search
the databases automatically and update the maps as outbreaks occur. Other
researchers could also mix the data with their own data sets.

Mashups mix data into global service by Declan Butler
Nature 439, 6-7 (5 January 2006) | doi:10.1038/439006a

For further more-detailed information on methods, see
http://declanbutler.info/blog/?p=16

via Open Access News - What OA to data will make possible

I think Google Earth is an amazing visualization platform for georeferenced
information.
Opening up data and innovative linking between publications, data, and
various visualizations and applications has a lot of potential I think.

Posted by Richard Akerman on January 06, 2006 at 04:14 PM in Data




-------------------------------------
To SUBSCRIBE:
send a blank e-mail message to
[email protected]

To UNSUBSCRIBE:
send a blank email message to
[email protected]
-------------------------------------

These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.

-----------
[email protected]
www.canarie.ca/~bstarn
skype: pocketpro
SkypeIn: +1 614 441-9603


_______________________________________________
news mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.canarie.ca/mailman/listinfo/news