Community Systems Research

These projects concentrate on building community systems for scientists in the biological sciences. There are thus strong overlaps with genome informatics and computational biology. A "community system" is a digital library that encodes all the knowledge of a community and a software environment for interacting with that knowledge across the network. The knowledge includes formal materials, such as literature and databases, and informal materials, such as newsletters and results. The environment enables users to browse existing materials and analyze selections, and to share new materials and forge links.

WCS (Worm Community System)

This project has been on-going since 1989 at the University of Arizona, Tucson and moved to the University of Illinois with Schatz in 1993. It was one of the winners of the NSF National Collaboratory competition and the only one that built a working system for real users. As a result, it has been featured as a national model for science information systems in National Academy of Science reports (e.g. Building National Collaboratories: Applying Information Technology for Scientific Research, 1993) and in articles in Science magazine. In particular, WCS was featured in the lead news article in the special issue of Computing in Science of Science magazine (261: 841-843, Aug 13, 1993) Beyond Databases and E-Mail with a sidebar on Networking the Worm.

The first release of the WCS runs in 25 laboratories across the Internet of molecular biologists who study the nematode worm C. elegans. In this release, the goal was to demonstrate the technological feasibility of providing a system directly in labs which supported interaction with interlinked literature and databases. The WCS project is now funded by the NSF BIR-BIO to demonstrate the sociological utility of the community systems technology to effect biologists. The second release is now available in beta version and supports interactive entry as well as browsing of structured objects. Any type of data can be entered and checked from the local lab then published out into the community space. We are now experimenting with the sociology of electronic communities.

PPCS (Psychiatric Postmortem Community System)

neuroscience

NSF IBN-BIO proposal