Shaping a Web That Better Serves Humanity
By Catherine Varmazis

Scientific research and healthcare are two of the areas that stand to benefit from a new transatlantic collaboration that aims to grow a better Web.

One hundred million nodes – that's the number of servers now interconnected on the Internet. Citing the rapid growth of the World Wide Web over the last decade, a group of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the U.K.'s University of Southampton believe the Web is now so large as to require its own field of study if it is to evolve systematically and serve humanity optimally.

At a briefing held at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., on Thursday, the scientists announced the formation of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), the purpose of which is to produce the scientific advances necessary to guide the future design and use of the Web. Using a multidisciplinary approach, the WSRI will generate a research agenda for understanding the scientific, technical, and social challenges underlying the growth of the Web. WSRI researchers will address how Web-based information is accessed, and its reliability. Legal questions and social networks – how people use the Web to communicate – will be critical areas of study.

Such fundamental research is considered crucial, said Tim Berners-Lee, professor at MIT and the University of Southampton, and one of WSRI's cofounders: "The Web is something we created, so we have a duty to make it better if we can." Referring to the organic growth of the infrastructure thus far and the basic rules established early in its development, Berners-Lee said, "We've created the microscopic infrastructure of the Web, but little things by themselves are not sufficient to understand the big thing. We'll be developing new ways of analyzing things and will be building systems that have completely new properties."

Berners-Lee stressed the interdisciplinary nature of the effort needed, saying that biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, legal experts, and economists must all be involved. "Huge number of fields must be linked together. We must think about and engineer the Web as one huge system." The goal is social, he said, to make a system that serves humanity. "It's about making the Web infrastructure a richer, more powerful space in which to do exciting things."

"Accountable software" is an example of the kind of benefit the multidisciplinary approach could yield. In drug discovery, clinical trial data involves policy issues. Researchers need to know which patient data they can use, and what they can use it for. If, for example, epidemiological data were collected, could it also be used for anti-terrorism activities? By drawing upon data not only from the clinical trials, but also from federal regulations governing such data, "accountable software" would explain where the data is from and which rules it used to combine it, to help users figure out if they're legally allowed to use it for the purposes they have in mind.

Blending the Boundaries

Underscoring the multidisciplinary approach, Nigel Shadbolt, professor of artificial intelligence in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, said he has always been intrigued by the boundaries between disciplines, "which is where a lot of the interesting questions live." Because the Web has gotten so large, Shadbolt said, "We need new forms of analysis and new methodologies to understand some of its dynamic properties, how it evolves, and what makes certain aspects of it stable and resilient." more

Bio-IT Briefs

United BioSource Corp. has acquired BioCor LLC, a provider of clinical data services to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. BioCor delivers dedicated clinical data services and medical writing capabilities to support the regulatory approval process for new drugs, from initial filing of an investigational new drug application to the final submission of a new drug application. BioCor's 85 employees will join UBC's new Biotechnology Solutions Group. Read the press release.

CombinatoRx Inc. announced positive preliminary results of its randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled phase 2 clinical trial of CRx-102 in rheumatoid arthritis. The trial compared CRx-102 plus a disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drug (DMARD) to placebo plus DMARD (control) in subjects with RA. In this trial, CRx-102 demonstrated statistically significant improvements on primary and secondary endpoints. Read the press release.

The Almac Group has introduced new integrated and ad hoc reporting capabilities to the clinical trial market.  These capabilities include new reports that join data from two of its divisions, Almac Clinical Technologies and Almac Clinical Services, and add the ability for users to create their own custom reports using a simple report creation tool. Read the press release.

Eastman Kodak Co.'s Molecular Imaging Systems group announced the release of a new Regulatory Edition of their KODAK Molecular Imaging analytical software for use in digital imaging systems for life science research and drug discovery applications. The Regulatory Edition supports compliance with FDA's Code of Federal Regulations Title 21, Part 11 Electronic Records; Electronic Signatures [21 CFR part 11]. Read the press release.

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