I have some strong reservations about data ownership when we talk about a Google-dependent world. However I think the current state of biomedical informatics is begging for the information giant to step into the picture. Deepak over at BBGM linked to some intriguing screenshots of Google Health. My first thought, “It’s about time!”. Health information management is a disaster in the U.S., so maybe Google was afraid of tackling this problem since so much of it is still out of their control.
We shouldn’t have to fill out lengthy forms on paper every time we need health care. We need open health information systems. We need predictive, preventive, and personalized medicine, as described by Dr. Leroy Hood of the Institute for Systems Biology. Health care as I see it today is reactive, meaning it applies some generalized solution only after the problem manifests itself as an ailment. We can do better. It’s an unfortunate situation that physicians deal with lumbering and bureaucratic information systems. Medical records should exist in decentralized repositories with real-time services for care providers as well as for patients themselves.
Tim O’Reilly was commenting on some Google business when he points out that data ownership is crucial to future technology giants.
we see here another demonstration of my Web 2.0 principle that “data is the Intel Inside”, and that many of the future battles between industry giants will be around who owns data, rather than who controls software APIs. In that battle, we’ll see deployed all kinds of techniques to “harness collective intelligence” to build added value databases of various kinds.”
Google now has a free 411 phone service which he suspects is a vehicle for harvesting voice data to train speech recognition and translation software. It makes perfect sense.
This is why I think data mining is an integral part of drug discovery. Can you sell a specific decision support system for therapeutic targets? How much is a proprietary data warehouse of experimental data worth?
The explosive data acquisition rate of modern life sciences is overwhelming our ability to interpret it. Perhaps Google had a good strategy for data integration prior to opening the floodgates of this 411 service. What’s clear is that Google knows information is worth money and they are more than willing to roll out great free services in order to get it from you.
Google has their annual Summer of Code. Plenty of great projects and extra incentives for students to participate. Including $5,000 per accepted student developer, of which $4,500 goes to the student and $500 goes to the mentoring organization.
A surprising lack of bioinformatics projects though… I only noticed a few:
Phyloinformatics with ideas for GBrowse, AJAX, and improving BioJava.
Michigan’s CSCS is working on running batch simulations with different parameter settings on a grid architecture.
UCSF’s GenMAPP project wants a structured wiki for gene pathways.
That’s the only 3 I found at first glance. Other non-bio projects worth noting are FANN (looking to go parallel/multi-threaded) and there’s even big projects like Apache, MySQL, and PHP.
Some really good things have come from SoC in the past. It looks like this year will be no exception.