Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
will enable a mechanism of suggestive collaboration that does not currently
exist for biomedical researchers and requires assay defi nitions provided by the
ontology.
28.5 WILL WIKIS AND ONLINE COLLABORATION
CHANGE THE WORLD?
The word “wiki” has become a general-purpose term sometimes used to cover
a very wide range of online collaborative authoring environments from
Wikipedia, to blogs, and to community forums and news sites (see Chapter 5).
Many of these differ widely in their interfaces, communities, and approaches
to editing and publishing information. Wikipedia is clearly changing the world,
especially when it comes to engaging the masses to collaborate, contribute,
and develop a new form of encyclopedia. The Media Wiki platform (http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_wiki) is free and open-source software and has
been downloaded and deployed many times to set up corporate wikis, for
example, Pfi zerpedia ( http://pubs.acs.org/email/cen/html/090207084512.html ).
Wikis are showing up everywhere. WikiGenes (http://www.wikigenes.org/),
WikiProteins ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2441475/ ), Wiki-
Pathways ( http://www.wikipathways.org/index.php/WikiPathways ), and the
WikiProfessional Concept Web (http://www.wikiprofessional.org/about.php),
to name a few, are already contributing to knowledge sharing, management,
and development of the Semantic Web for the life sciences.
Many blogs cover areas of the drug development process from biology
through chemistry and compound analysis and validation. While these rarely
deal with the day-to-day details of an ongoing drug discovery and develop-
ment process, they do play an important role in education, spreading best
practice and identifying poor and unethical practices. Blogs and their associ-
ated commenting communities are becoming a strong component of the self-
regulation and analysis of the drug discovery and development community. At
the same time blogs and similar websites and community forums are also
providing a platform for those critical of the processes, organizations, and
individuals involved in the advance of modern medicine. In some areas these
communities and their websites overlap. This form of criticism and analysis,
whether constructive or not, is likely to continue and the corporate, academic,
and individual response to it will be an increasingly important area for com-
munity engagement. The necessity for this engagement is another way in which
the social Web is changing the world of drug development.
Between the word processor document on a shared disk and the fully open
and editable wiki, or a blog accepting comments, there is a wide range of col-
laborative authoring tools and publication mechanisms. GoogleDocs, EtherPad,
Wave, and Microsoft Offi ce Live Workspace as well as wikis and other Web-
based content management systems offer shared spaces where documents can
be prepared and edited with one other person, defi ned communities and
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