Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Executable
. Besides these informative SNSs, many Web sites pro-
vide open and collaborative platforms to search executableWeb services,
and even to execute computation. This category includes
Seekda
(
http://webservices.seekda.com/
), a Web services search
engine.
Yahoo Pipes
(
http://pipes.yahoo.com/
), a composition tool to
build data mashups that aggregate Web feeds, Web pages, and
other contents.
Amazon EC2
(
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
), Amazon Elastic
Compute Cloud, a cloud computing service provided by Amazon.
It allows users to rent virtual computers to run their own appli-
cations in a pay-as-you-go manner.
SNS for the Research-Specific Purpose
Informative
. There are various SNS sites for academia, for example,
CiteULike (
http://www.citeulike.org/
), Connotea (
http://www.connotea
.org/
), Microsoft Academic Search (
http://academic.research.microsoft
.com/
), Arnetminer (
http://arnetminer.org/
), and Nature Network (
http://
network.nature.com/
). These Web sites are based on author-publication-
citation network and can be used to identify connections among authors,
publications, and research topics. Nature Network also provides facilities
such as blogs, forums, and groups.
There are also SNS sites for specific communities, such as life
scientists (prome teonetwork,
h ttp://prome teonetwork.com/
), doctors
(
doctors.net.uk, http://www.doctors .net.uk/
), and physicians ( sermo,
http://www.sermo.com/
; within3,
https://www.wit hin3.com/
). These
sites provide not only general SNS functionality such as news feed,
e-mail, and forum but also community-specific ones such as online
training, e-learning, and access to digital libraries. There are also SNS
s i t e s w i t h a n eve n n a r r ower a u d i e n c e , s u c h a s E c o l i Wi k i (
h t t p : / /
ecoliwiki.net/
) and WikiPathways (
http://www.wi kipathways.org/
)
to annotate bacteria and biological pathways, respectively.
Informative-Executable
. Many sites go beyond just bringing
people together. Instead, they enable researchers to share data and
protocols. The protocols describe the methodologies to conduct
experiments and obtain data. We put them into the
informative-
executable
category because they reflect
laboratory routines but
