LIMS and Web 2.0, makes a great combo!
LIMS & Web 2.0, makes a great combo!
by John H. Jones – President, LABLynx, Inc.
The Internet is a relatively new tool for science (relative to a tool like the microscope). The Internet was orginally created by scientists to enhance real time collaboration between scientists. Today, scientific information is prolific on the Internet and with the advent of new technologies and techniques such as Blogs, Wikis, RSS and other such technobable, collectively known as Web 2.0, scientific collaboration and information consumption will explode. Science and all other knowledge professions can take advantage of Web 2.0 to advance both pure and applied research to limits not seen since the advent of electricity.
The LABLynx Journal Web Service is Web 2.0 for LIMS
So with all of this in mind, LABLynx has developed a new Web Service product line built on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) called the LABLynx Journal. This web service will be released later this year and will provide direct access to literally 10’s of thousands of scientific and laboratory related articles, news, journals, blogs and much more. The LABLynx Journal is essentially an RSS aggregator of scientific and laboratory information. The journal delivers the information you are specifically interested in, directly to your desktop or within your LIMS application as an application mashup.
The LABLynx Journal also offers syndication of custom information as an RSS feed. You can link that feed into your LIMS or corporate portal or news reader software. Information from the Journal is gathered from thousands of public and restricted (password) access, private sources and both public and private applications, including LIMS and Electronic Laboratory Notebooks, Scientific Journals and traditional media news sources to provide a seamless integration of all related information that your lab needs to do its work with quality and efficiency. These feeds are real time and up to the minute and provide the ability for you to customize to your individual needs.
So how does all of this work? The fundamental technology behind the LABLynx Journal is RSS and the elements of Web 2.0. However, the best explanation of Web 2.0 is as follows:
So What is Web 2.0, why do I want it and where can I get it?
Let’s start with what Web 2.0 is. Here is a pretty good definition from Wikipedia:
The phrase Web 2.0 was created by O’Reilly Media to refer to a supposed second generation of network-centric services available on the internet that let people collaborate and share information online in a new way – such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools and folksonomies. O’Reilly Media, in collaboration with MediaLive International, used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences and since then it has become a popular, if ill-defined and often criticized, buzzword amongst the technical and marketing communities.
The future of Science & the Laboratory:
With the Internet in a solid transition from one way communications with static web sites to a two way, multi-threaded form of communication; we can expect collaboration, communication and information exchange advances, to move to an entirely new level. With tools like RSS, you can perform, what is commonly referred to as a mashup. For a good definition of a mashup, again I will refer to Wikipedia:
A mashup is a website or Web 2.0 application that uses content from more than one source to create a completely new service. This is akin to transclusion.
Content used in mashups is typically sourced from a third party via a public interface or API. Other methods of sourcing content for mashups include Web feeds (e.g. RSS or Atom) and JavaScript.
Much the way blogs revolutionised online publishing, mashups are revolutionizing web development by allowing anyone to combine existing data from sources like Amazon.com, eBay, Google, Strikeiron, Windows Live and Yahoo! in innovative ways. The greater availability of simple and lightweight APIs have made mashups relatively easy to design. They require minimal technical knowledge and thus custom mashups are sometimes created by unlikely innovators, combining available public data in new and creative ways.
This Blog is a great example of a Mashup:
Look no further than this blog to see the perfect example of a mashup. First the content that defines Web 2.0 and Mash-ups is linked in from Wikipedia, the survey to the left comes from a survey site, the supposed (context sensitive ads from Yahoo) come from the Yahoo site, the “Listen” link comes from the Bio-ITWorld site, the email subscription stuff that is above the Yahoo ads, comes from the Feedburner.com site and the First Author articles below, come in as an RSS feed from the First Author website. You can’t get much more mashed-up than that and the best part is that it is all integrated seamlessly.
This is an example of how the LABLynx Journal will integrate within the LIMS and other laboratory applications or just stand-alone. When I created this blog, I used the editing facilities built into the blog editor to create these mashups. The things that are peripheral to what I actually wrote are controlled by the site operator. Many other blog sites on the Internet make use of mashups in a similar way to this one.
Other Resources:
I have provided a link to a very good podcast from one of the editors of Bio-ITWorld that gives a brief editorial on the future direction of science which includes the use of mash-ups. You can find the link to the podcast at the top of my blog that says “Listen“.
I have also provided an RSS feed from a site called “Firstauthor”. This site advocates open access scientific information and journals. Most of the publishing industry is moving to an Open Access model for information which makes the LABLynx Journal possible. You can see the feed content below:
