Design riffs & scientific collaboration

Tue 20 Mar 2007

Just as politics has met “Web 2.0″ design, so has science. Recently out-of-beta, the Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (that’s CAMERA) is an online collaborative database for microbial metagenomics. Metagenomics is the sequencing of genomes from environmental samples, and is expected to pick up the genomes of diverse microorganisms that can’t be cultured in a lab. In the case of CAMERA, the data is coming from ocean sampling by the J. Craig Venter Institute.

While we’ll have to wait for consensus to weigh in on the scientific merits of this enterprise, the website itself is riffing behind the web 2.0 design vocabulary.

  1. The Logo CAMERA logo The typeface for the logo looks similar to Trade or Alternative Gothic, used in the Web 2.0 logos of FeedBurner, YouTube, and xanga. The logo also uses three (!) colors, plus the globe and the ’swoosh.’

  2. Rounded corners rounded

  3. Browser compatibility The FAQ states “We believe users of this website will get the best results if they use Firefox as their browser.”

  4. File storage Yep, it’s a Thumper, which Tim O’Reilly called “the Web 2.0 server“

  5. Mashup When you search for a gene or protein sequence, the results page displays a Google map of where the matching sample was collected from. I love it! google

I find Web 2.0 apps (like Connector or Writeboard) to be among the most usable sites, so I certainly welcome influence from that sector of design into collaborative scientific applications. Despite the web’s origin as a research tool, it is social utilization that has pushed its functional boundaries. CAMERA is not the only example of this type of feedback. While arXiv has been doing open access e-prints for over fifteen years, PLoS ONE is more like a scientific kuro5hin, where articles are posted, annotated, and revised. It’s becoming about collaboration, not just dissemination.

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