Bio & Web - IT: Growth and Prospects

I tried to design a sleek, light weight, modular, extensible, object based, rich text editor which can be embedded into website with ease. I could not find such a one any where on the web, except for two instances which were not supported.

I started with that code and fixed many bugs, customized it, brought in more object orientation. 

You can visit here. for demo. 

Essentially the design is simple: 

There is a Button Class which forms the parent class to all the tool bar features. 

There is editor class which is an IFRAME where actual editing takes place. 

Currently it just shows that the content is getting modified as expected. 

Lot more needs to be done. 

Next time I will sit and explain more on the classes and how inheritance is going on. 

can be categorized into three:

1. Server side technologies: PHP, ASP, JAVA, C++, C#
2. Client Side technologies: Javascript, JAVA, AJAX    
3. Database
   support: MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, IBM DB2 and SQL Server, flat file support 

Wikis have lot of advantages to offer. Typical of them are listed below:

• collaborative authoring

• Easy editing - articles can edited at anytime by anyone

• Easy citing and sourcing

• Name of article is part of the hyperlink

• Editing is done via a web browser 

• Office Documents

• Server storage of documents

• Automatic Versioning and Difference Engines for documents

• Search facilities

• Automatic links to discussion pages 

• Most recent editions very visible; easy monitoring

• Massively distributable collaboration

• Groups and Categories

• Easy links to multi-language documentation

A wiki is a page or collection of Web
pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify
content, using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative
websites and to power community websites. The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia
is one of the best-known wikis. Wikis are used in business to provide intranets
and Knowledge Management systems.

Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki
software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as "the simplest online
database that could possibly work".

"Wiki" is originally a Hawaiian word
for "fast".

Here are two graphs which are showing the growth of BioIT over all.
Out of curiosity I gave the terms

1. Bioinformatics
2. systems biology
3. genomics
4. proteomics

for in

• Google scholar: Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.
• Pubmed : PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 19 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to 1948. PubMed includes links to full text articles and other related resources.

with year on year accumulation, to see how the growth is.

Interestingly and as expected, its growing.

There are couple of interesting observations:

Consider google scholar gives articles published in journals + web based articles and notes hence google scholar gives at least 5 times more hits than pubmed.

Pubmed gives the articles getting published in ~3000 odd scientific journals.

I have no clue why there is dip in 2004 for the key word bioinformatics and a sudden surge for the key word genomics in Scholar search. But you can see a consistent growth for all keywords in pubmed search. It might the time when Bioinformatics was further divided into different disciplines calling them genomics, systems biology, proteomics etc. etc.

The other interesting point is to see that systems biology term started appearing in publication only since 2003 onwards. But the keyword was in use in web articles and in day to day usage since 1997 -98. hmmm..quite interesting for me.

So, students!! BioIT is here to stay. Enjoy Life. Be Happy.

Dear Students/Teachers/Parents

The Objective:
A Scientist's Perspective of why BioIT Struggling. A failure due to too much branding before maturing. A genuine case showing Half Knowledge is catastrophic

The Audience:
This note is in context to those Indian Middle class parents, teachers and students who invested and lost lakhs of rupees to get their ward trained in bioinformatics with a dream of making great money in a very less span of time for a comfortable living as happened in IT Domain.

IT is a technology, NOT BioIT yet: When science matures, its applications lead us to technologies which would appreciate us to a ‘better’ standard of living. Science is a path of observations, systematization and standardization of a subset of Absolute knowledge. The applications emerging out of that science is technology.

BioIT is NOT IT: Come out of this Illusion. Bioinformatics / Computational Biology / BioIT (which I will be interchangeably use in this essay) is emerging science and NOT Technology. Bioinformatics as a science is yet to be stabilized, systematized and standardized. At least one should have realized it now that it is lack of this clarity that resulted in the closure of many bioinformatics companies world wide which went ahead with large investments after the release of 1st sequence draft of human genome in 2000-2001. None of the companies ever realized their revenue projections.

BioIT is NOT dot com business: BioIT will NOT generate revenues at the pace seen by IT business. IT is a technology emerged out of the digital science revolution. At this instant of time, BioIT is research and development oriented since still we do not know all the biological parameters and the associated rules. Further, we still do not know implications of how to play with the infinitesimally known parameters and especially on a computer. Hence, MIND INTENSIVE and RISKY.

Then the question of: Where’s the Opportunity?

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