1.
Using Web 2.0 Technology for Data Curation, Publication, and Promotion
Anthony Salvagno, Andy Maloney, Pranav Rathi, Steve Koch ... aka the KochLab
Scienti c research has typically been hidden until a researcher publishes his data in a journal. In today's interconnected world, scientists can publish in nearly
real time in a variety of means using a slew of di ering technologies. The open access principle has snowballed its way into many labs, providing a new found
accessibility to students, principle investigators, and even media outlets that could not have been possible with previous standards. Google's mainstream
domination has pushed a thirst for information and knowledge that current and future scientists have ingested and regurgitated. This poster will highlight
some of the most popular Web 2.0/Science 2.0 technologies and how they can be used to provide information to the masses.
Video Data
KochLab uses Youtube to store and display both raw and ana-
Youtube/Vimeo lyzed videos. Using either Youtube or Vimeo allows for easy dis-
tribution and inclusion in lab notebooks. Vimeo is viewed as the
iPhone/iPad & Android/Honeycomb
more professional of the two services.
The advent of these devices has allowed the further evolution of
Designed speci cally for the scienti c community and currently internet technologies in such a way that all data is now acces-
BenchFly used for biological resources. Users share protocols, experimen- sible at any time from anywhere. Data can be recorded with
tal results, and tips and tricks. We currently use it to upload pro- these devices, shared, published, and promoted immdiately.
tocols for our experiments. With mobile technology you are no longer tethered to your lab,
o ce, or desktop because you can bring your research with you
JOVE is more like a video journal than it is like youtube. Videos anywhere.
JOVE are published alongside shortly written documentation de-
scribing the video, but all videos are open access.
Publication/Archiving
Google Docs are a powerful tool that provides most of the docu-
Google Docs ment creation capabilities as Microsoft O ce with two key fea-
Image Data tures added: collaboration in real time, and publish to the web.
Very useful for data recording and publication, but also ideal for
scienti c note taking. Documents can be fully public, private to
We use both services interchangably due to max upload limits yourself, or private amongst a group.
Flickr/Picasa for free accounts. Both services can be synced from phones, but
Note taking and data sharing don’t have to be traditional. With
Flickr is a little easier to embed in websites and notebooks. Both Blogger/Wordpress powerful blogging software you determine what is published,
are excellent services. Picasa comes with your Google account.
who sees it, and how formal a setting you want. Both services
have full embed capabilities so your data on Youtube, Flickr,
Figshare was designed for publishing raw data, independent
FigShare gures, un nished projects, and more. You can upload several
SlideShare, etc can all be displayed in one post or several.
di erent le types and publish it. You keep the rights to your re-
PLOS journals combine next gen web tech with traditional jour-
search and you can site references or be sited. PLOS nal publishing. Articles are open, commentable, and amend-
able. PLOS One focuses on publishing regardless of the per-
Slideshare is to powerpoint, what youtube is to videos. In the
Slideshare past we have used it to display our talks, use it for practice talks
ceived impact level which allows science to propagate and let
time determine impact.
(you can upload audio les and sync it with the slides), and dis-
play scienti c gures. Slideshare presentations are fully embed-
Evernote is like a note taking Dropbox. All your notes are private
able.
Evernote unless you make them public. You can keep images, videos,
Dropbox is a cloud storage service. All of your information is pri- thoughts, nished works, etc and access them anywhere. Every-
Dropbox vate and secure. You can upload anything you want to the ser- thing is fully searchable even words in images!
vice, access it anywhere, and share data/ les with anyone of
your choosing by making a shared folder. You can also choose to Flavors was intended to provide the masses with a quick and
make les public on the web. Flavors.me easy web presence. It has an excellent aggregation system and
is versatile enough to be used for a scienti c capacity. Andy
used it to create and display his resume and included links to all
his videos, notebook, and dissertation.
In collaboration with Rob Olendorf, Assistant professor of Li-
UNM Library brary Information Sciences, we use the Institutional Repository
Collaboration/Promotion to automate several tasks from retrieving data from our lab serv-
Twitter is mostly used for rapid communication, but can also be
ers to tagging, describing, and archiving data. The data is reli-
ably archived and is readable by both humans and machines.
Apps
Twitter used to promote anything you may have in the cloud as most
services sync with Twitter. Anthony has twitter linked to his blog Many of the services listed here have dedicated phone apps or
so his scienti c posts get promoted on twitter immediately. mobile websites (which work like apps). This allows you to easily
sync your data with your cloud service(s) in real time. There are
many other apps that are useful in the lab setting. We have pro-
Facebook is perhaps the biggest aggregator on the web. It com-
Facebook bines communication, social networking, cloud service aggre-
totyped an inventory system using QR codes and Barcode Scan-
ner. We have aligned optics and lasers using phone ccd cameras
gation, and the famous “Like” button all in one place. You can
and leveling apps that use the accelerometer and gyroscope in
even sync with Twitter for double the promotion.
phones. App markets are expanding by leaps and bounds every
day so new apps that can aid in research just await to be found.
FriendFeed is a lot like Facebook except in one key area. You can
FriendFeed make rooms (similar to groups in FB) that collaboraters sub-
scribe to share documents, data, papers, etc. Everything is in
near real time so commenting is more like a chat. In the past we
have experimented with using FriendFeed rooms as note pages.