[OWW-Discuss] Fwd: Proposal to 'Wikify' GenBank Meets Stiff Resistance

[Dan Bolser]

On 25/03/2008, Austin Che <austin at csail.mit.edu> wrote:
>
>
> > a) grab all the data from the PDB (for example)
> > b) stick all the data into a revisioning system
> > c) allow users to freely edit the data, including automatic clean up
> 'bots',
> > algorithms, etc., etc.
> > d) have all changes automatically emailed to a mailing list for
> community
> > review, approval etc.
> >
> > Now, once we get to step d, in the time since step a, the PDB data has
> been
> > updated by the PDB. We now need to merge the updated PDB data with our
> > independently modified data. (This is where we need to go beyond a
> simple
> > revisioning system).
>
>
>     That was supposed to be the goal of wikiproteins
>     http://www.wikiproteins.org/Meta:Wikiproteins
>     Roughly speaking, it does exactly the above. It works with
>     databases like swiss-prot and downloads all the data into a
>     semantic wiki form allowing edits. The changes made by the
>     community can be kept separate from the "authoritative" version
>     and periodically it's sent back to the original source for
>     updating. At least that's the idea. They collaborate with those
>     databases so not all of the databases are resisting this idea.



Yeah, I like the idea, and its good to see database developers on board with
that project. I spent some time hanging out near some wikiproteins
developers (as close as I could get) in irc://irc.freenode.net/#omegawiki -
I was disappointed at their lack of communication. For example, I have
worked on a Swiss-Prot parser, so I was curious as to how they had decided
to relationally model the data (if at all),  but I couldn't get any feed
back from them. Perhaps I was in the wrong place / asking the wrong
questions / etc.

Also some of the concepts that they expound at wikiproteins are really
confusing, and so far they have not decided to answer my questions about
them.  For example,

http://www.wikiproteins.org/Partner_talk:Knewco
http://www.wikiproteins.org/Meta_talk:Wikiproteins

http://www.wikiproteins.org/Meta_talk:Personal_Desktop
http://www.wikiproteins.org/Meta_talk:Alerts


I am sure wikiproteins will deliver, I am just not sure when (or what
really)... Did anyone try the new beta release?



--
> Austin Che           <austin at csail.mit.edu>          (617)253-5899
>



-- 
hello

-- 
hello
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