Bench Press

The “2.0” moniker is often abused to hype up connections with the new dynamic web applications of today. This is why I’ve co-opted it to describe a new application which is to WebMD’s 1.0 as Gmail/Twitter are to old-school webmail/message boards.

As many of you know, WebMD is a leading health information internet portal, providing a wide range of medical information for both casual patients who browse the site and medical professionals. But, while the information WebMD provides is rich and valuable, it is still a static website, valuable, but not dynamic or intuitive or mobile.

Wolfram Research (maker of popular computational algebra system/scientific computing software Mathematica)’s new WolframAlpha search engine attacks the first two challenges. One of the fundamental problems with traditional portals like WebMD is that to find specific information, the user needs to have some idea of where the information is or how it’s stored/used in conjunction with other information – in other words, it requires contextual knowledge. For example, to figure out how to determine if someone is overweight, the user needs to know:

1. That BMI is the relevant metric
2. Where to find how to calculate BMI and where/how to get the information that goes into the BMI formula
3. Compare BMI with relevant comparisons
4. Understand the limitations and implications of the BMI metric

WolframAlpha tries to simplify this by reducing the dependence of the quality of the search results on contextual knowledge. In the BMI example above, WolframAlpha hasn’t quite solved how to easily and quickly answer steps 1 and 4, but it has made it much easier to do steps 2 and 3. For instance, the BMI of a person who is 5’ 10” and weighs 165 lbs and the relevant comparisons (to the US population as a whole, and to clinical definitions of “overweight”, etc.) What’s incredible is that WolframAlpha won’t only provide you with the data, if it’s feasible, it will even provide you with charts and graphs to illustrate them. While this is a far cry from Jeopardy-playing supercomputers, it is a much welcomed change to the current heavily context-dependent search paradigm.

And, WolframAlpha does a lot more than that. On their sample page of examples of health/medical requests, WolframAlpha breaks out several other capabilities:

• find growth charts/body statistics
• compute calories burned
• figure out Blood Alcohol Content levels
• estimate risks/mortality rates for diseases
• look up diagnoses by ICD-9 code
• understand medical test results
• look up information about drugs, hospitals, and public health information

Very cool, and, despite the more technical bent to information, much more usable than a standard search engine query for finding relevant health information. There is great promise in this technology, especially if it’s natural language processing algorithms improve to the point where it can provide useful information for healthcare professionals or curious/nervous patients (perhaps by combing through/organizing the information in WebMD’s healthcare-professional-oriented).

(Image Credits)

Like many of you reading this blog I’m continually impressed with the Web 2.0 revolution. Wikis, blogging, and social networks are reshaping media and communication by creating new norms about content (creation and consumption) and participation. With the usefulness of these technologies on display everyday adapting them for use in science is a logical step to many scientists. This has set off a rush of experimentation and discussion on the potential of Science 2.0. As is common in the scientific world the acceptance of new methodology for doing pretty much anything can be hotly debated and the adoption of Science 2.0 is no exception.

Being a tech geek and a young scientist I find it easy to see the promise presented in adapting internet technologies to science. The community empowering nature of Web 2.0 technologies seems to me a perfect fit for scientific work and is what drew me to start taking the plunge into Science 2.0. As I started to delve into the tools and communities that are currently present a few things thoroughly impressed me:

• Integration of tools – Citeulike and Friendfeed are an awesome integration of two separate services. Allyson over @ The Mind Wobbles (I hope that title sticks ) has a great post detailing the power and general experience of Citeulike and Friendfeed.
• Availability - Despite the somewhat fledgling status of Science 2.0 it’s easy to google for several different science social networks, find science focused groups on places like Friendfeed, or find various lab notebook replacements (e.g. OpenWetWare).
• Great community – The Web 2.0 movement would be nothing without the people that generate and participate in the various communities. This holds just as true for Science 2.0 and the quality of the science community is put on display each and everyday through amazing blog posts (just pick any of the blogs on the right), online discussions, and development of new tools.

While my dip into science on the web has been very positive, there are a few things that I think could be done to help push Science 2.0 further:

• Consolidation of some communities – I know I talked about the easy availability of a variety of services as something that impressed me, but duplication of sites (wow there are a lot of social network sites for science) also produces an unintended consequence of diluting the community. While I love the fact that you get really used to seeing the same people participating in discussions on say Friendfeed, I’d be more than willing to exchange a bit of familiarity for larger membership in a few central communities.
• Social Networks – I’ve really only had a chance to look at Labroots in any real detail so far but from first impressions and from commentary I’ve seen I think it holds true that the scientist specific social networks still leave a lot to be desired. They are mostly me-too services with few if any compelling/differentiating factors that can draw a critical mass of users. If anyone has found one in particular that stands out above the others feel free to drop me a line I’d definitely be interested in checking it out.
• Spread the word – Ultimately the best thing we can do as a community is continue to talk about science on the web to our colleagues, mentors, and bosses. Helping to grow the community one member at a time is something we can all do.

Overall everything I’ve seen and been able to use so far makes me very optimistic about the direction Science 2.0 is headed. As 2008 ends I look forward to seeing what 2009 will bring (hopefully not lightsaber wielding raptors…).

(Image Credit: Visualization of the relationships of over 700,000 scientific papers published between 2001 and 2005)