21 July 2006

NAR, Nature Aggademia & Bioinformatics web services

Yesterday, I've read the 150 abstracts of the special web server issue from NAR. About those 150 articles see my previous post about this. All thoses abstracts where tagged with connotea here.

As a Bioinformatician (yes I am), I like automated operations and most of all those
servers require a 'clickodrome'/web interface, that is to say,
a manual input: for example, I cannot use it to perform multiple
sequence analysis. NAR and other publishers should now require from
authors that the ouput of those tools should be written in a fully
parsable xhtml syntax, or better, in XML/RDF backed with a XSLT/xhtml stylesheet.
See also: BioMoby.

In the issue of NAR, there was a paper about Hubmed written by Alf Eaton. Alf now works at Nature and he just have released an experimental and beta social site called aggademia which aggregates the 50 most popular scientific blogs. At first sight, it works like postgenomic. I'm a little puzzled now with all those social web sites at Nature: connotea, Nature Network Boston, and (perhaps) now aggademia. On each of those site if had to register a new profile, I could create a group of user and send invitation ("Oh Nooo Pierre, not AGAIN one of your CENSORED social network"). Why not ("...you just have to......") a large integrated social scientific network ?


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

:-D message received.

I agree also, single sign-on will be very useful when it finally arrives. I've heard that Drupal will be quick to support whichever sign-on method is appropriate, so sites like Aggademia will be much easier to create profiles on in the future, hopefully...

Anonymous said...

The Bioinformatics Directory does offer a RSS feeds
Syndication page
Also search based feeds:
search with rss example