New Web Sites Provide Tools For Wading Through The Electronic Information Deluge

Edward B. Jakobovits is president of SciWeb Inc. (http://www.sciweb.com), an Internet-based information and communication service for life science professionals located in Menlo Park, Calif. Information is pouring out electronic pipes. More data, reports, documents, and charts than at any time in history are being created and broadcast electronically to the farthest reaches of the planet at lightning speed. With so much data to access, scientists face an age-old challenge-locating useful information. In corporate settings, management sets policy on who gets to see what, and librarians and information systems personnel see to it that the right people do. They filter content and construct infrastructure that lets digital bits move about their business. On the World Wide Web, however, there is no authority to decide who sees what and no one to create an interconnected information structure that ties data together in a sensible way. The Internet was, in fact, designed to bypass such control. Such organizational problems are not new-they have long faced the print industry. Publishers generate enormous amounts of data to be cataloged and presented to readers. Perhaps the most effective way to organize this information has been to subdivide it into journals focused on specific topics. Readers are able to choose their sources based on journal emphasis. Such solutions are now beginning to find their way onto the Web. Early Internet sites responded to the overwhelming content on the Web with search engines that combined raw computer power and novel software. These search engines created large indexes of key words from Web pages and linked them to other pages on the Web. Sites like Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com), with subject-based indexes, and WebCrawler (http://www.webcrawler.com), with a simple word-based index, quickly provided models on how to access pages on the Internet. These approaches, however, had severe limitations. Topic-based sites could neither subdivide indexes fast enough for growing content nor catalog fast enough all the sites appearing daily. Key word-based sites faced other issues-single key words could easily appear on thousands of pages. Which site was the important one? Graphically oriented pages with few key words tended to disappear into the background. Worst of all, the context of the data was usually lost in the process of indexing. Later Web sites introduced a more useful paradigm for handling Internet data. These sites did not destroy context-they collated content rather than just pages. They searched the Web for sites and information based on criteria relevant to a unique group of readers and centralized resources in one easy-to-access spot on the Web. For example, in the life science field, early efforts were organized by Internet infrastructure organizations such as the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which helped create the Web (http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/). Academic organizations such as Harvard Medical School (http://golgi.harvard.edu/genome.html), and motivated individuals (for example, see Pedro's Bio Molecular Research Tools at http://www.public.iastate.edu/~pedro/research_tools.html) also contributed. These sites maintained large directories of Web pages valuable to life sciences. The United States government then introduced its own content, primarily through the National Institutes of Health (http://www/nih.gov), the Library of Congress (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/welcome.html), and specific health-related sections such as the Food and Drug Administration (http://www.fda.gov), when these entities put online their enormous archived resources. More recent commercial sites are leading the charge into a broader coverage of biological resources. BioMedNet (http://www.biomednet.com) provides online access to a list of professional journals, BioSpace (http://www.biospace.com) collects life-science-related documentation, and BioOnline (http://www.bio.com) has begun an online catalog and ordering facility. Biological Data Transport (http://www.data-transport.com) has created an online auction facility in which transactions can occur through the site. SciWeb (http://www.sciweb.com) is expanding its life science databases and creating online platforms for companies that serve the life science industry. All the sites provide employment boards, registries of life-science-related Web sites, and databases of life-science-associated companies and conferences. Electronic tools are expanding the definition of content by providing new outlets for communication possibilities. These include chat rooms for online conferencing, E-mail-based group mailing lists, and bulletin boards for electronic information exchange. These efforts will soon develop into sophisticated communication centers aimed at servicing groups with common interests. Such efforts include real-time audio and video conferencing centers with shared work spaces; databases tied together through common reference links; and tailored information services delivered into each reader's electronic mailbox, prescreened for reader preferences. These sites will also act as clearinghouses for industry information (for example, collection centers for company press releases, new product announcements, and government regulation updates) and provide facilities for online commerce. Ultimately, these sites will become online office centers in which professionals will work more productively. Sites providing preselected content and tools for interactivity at reasonable cost will be a lifesaver for anyone trying to make sense of the vast amounts of data floating around the Internet or private networks. Wading through the modern deluge will require access to well-organized, information-filtering resources able to carry one through to the next project.

New Web Sites Provide Tools For Wading Through The Electronic Information Deluge

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