1 Dan Bolser ( ) Bioinformatics to Systems Biology October 2010 Community Annotation and BioWikis

2 Presentation overview Community annotation Why is it necessary? BioWikis The Wiki Wiki Web! When does it work? Game mechanics?

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4 Community Annotation Has been driven by two key factors: The vast increase in biological data The clear success of Wikipedia

5 BioMoore's Law Over time:  Cost per unit of information can be decreased by orders of magnitude.  Throughput is increased by orders of magnitude. Fan et al Nat Rev Genet. Comprehensive disease studies that might require ~1bn genotypes would now cost only a few million dollars.  Revolution in human genetics.

6 Community Annotation Centralised databases can't cope with annotating the influx of data. Less investment in more specialised data. Fewer people with a stake. Specialists more disparate.  Communities are smaller and more focused. Do wikis hold the answer? Wikipedia as a model…

7 The Success of Wikipedia Wikipedia is consistently among one of the top 10 websites in the world ( ). Google > Facebook > YouTube > Yahoo! > Windows Live > Baidu > Wikipedia > k edits per day. 100k active users per month. WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology

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9 Why Wikipedia isn’t always the answer Wikipedia is an educational resource. – All articles are encyclopaedic in style. – Explicitly forbids data from ‘original research’: – Wikipedia does not publish original research. – No tools for analysis, presentation, or collection of ‘biological’ data. BioWikis!

10 BioWikis Wikis with a biological subject matter, customized for analysis, presentation and collection of specific biological data and biological data types:

11 Some examples WikiPathways – Adds specific pathway creation and editing tools to the wiki. – Data is exported in standard formats via APIs – Pico AR, Kelder T, van Iersel MP, Hanspers K, Conklin BR, Evelo C. (2008) WikiPathways: Pathway Editing for the People. PLoS Biol 6(7): doi: /journal.pbio –

12 Some examples WikiOpener MediaWiki extension – Adds tools like BLAST to the wiki – One of many ‘data extraction extensions’ – Brohée S, Barriot R, Moreau Y. (2010) Biological Wikis: combining wikis with databases. Bioinformatics. 26(17):2210 –

13 Some examples PDBWiki – Allows the protein structures in the PDB to be tagged with specific annotations. – Functions as a bug tracker for users of the PDB – Stehr H, Duarte JM, Lappe M, Bhak J, Bolser DM. (2010) PDBWiki: added value through community annotation of the Protein Data Bank. Database. baq009 –

14 Semantic MediaWiki Very powerful and generic MediaWiki extension. – Users can contribute structured data via forms using auto-completion. – Contributed data can be visualized in a variety of ways. – Data can be queried and reports produced. All done within the wiki. Data is ‘linked’…

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16 When does it work?

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18 When does it work? The barrier to annotation is low. The annotation provides direct benefit to the user: Functionality Self-promotion Recognition These factors often depend on COMMUNITY. Infrastructure Ease of use Provenance

19 Building a community... Activation energy! You have to build up a resource before users will contribute! Kittur et. al. (2007) Power of the few vs. wisdom of the crowd /power-of-the-few-vs- wisdom-of-the-crowd.html

20 Game mechanics? (Fun) Crowd sourcing – Using ‘the crowd’ to do useful work Game mechanics – Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software – Ease of use, robust infrastructure, and recognition of user contributions are encapsulated by the simple idea of making the site ‘fun’.

21 Recognition People work for recognition. – In science, this typically comes from publication of peer-reviewed papers. – Why contribute to a wiki? Perhaps this will get you a publication? Peer review is not just about papers. – Contributors to Wikipedia are recognised among their peers!

22 Recognition Alternative models of recognition. – Wiki edits are unlikely to impress anyone on a CV, however… – Community mailing lists are a great way to network. – Recognition can come from contribution to community projects! !!!

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24 Conclusions The wiki concept is a simple improvement on the original concept of the web. Sharing data. BioWikis must be fun and attractive for users. Structured wikis promise to change our idea of a ‘web database’. Read only databases will be hard to imagine.

25 Get involved! BBB mailing list IRC: – irc://irc.freenode.net/#bioinformatics – irc://irc.freenode.net/#semantic-mediawiki Wikis! – Wikipedia – Bioinformatics.Org me!

26 Acknowledgements Bifx.Org Directors  Prash, Jeff,... All the contributors to Jeff, Cody, D. Hamel, Prash, Sonny, Chris, B Fristensky, Nagpal, Mariap3636, Pingou,... Linus Torvalds for Linux, and all scientists who pursue their work with honesty and integrity. Henning Stehr and Jose Duarte for PDBWiki irc://irc.freenode.net/# bioinformatics

27 References Wikinomics: EcoliWiki / Gene Wiki / OpenWetWare / PDBWiki / Proteopedia / WikiGenes / WikiPathways / … Bioinformatics.Org wiki: The SEQanswers wiki: MCB: BiO Sites:

28 References See references within: – – – Semantic MediaWiki: – – irc://irc.freenode.net/#semantic-mediawiki