Earlier this year, I posted about the "Blog" phenomenon, and how it had
grown up into RSS. Well, here is another "ground up" phenomenon;
the WiKi (or WiKiWiKi). If you follow
http://dirac.cnrs-orleans.fr/fsatom_wiki/
you will find out what Wiki means. The above is actually one set up by the FSAtom
community, but there may well be a few others in the chemical community
(and if anyone has seen a good one, let this list know!).
The concept is somewhere in between a Blog (or personal web page),
and an email or chat list. Several interesting concepts pervade; thus
a WiKi is in one way what the creator of the Web TimBL intended all along,
which is one which is much less asymmetric (the Web is a write by one, read
by many medium) in that a WiKi is a write by many/read by many
system. Lest you worry that what one person writes, another could delete,
a full revision history is kept (so in that sense it is similar to the CVS
system used by programmers to record the development of code).
I found out recently that postgraduate students here are starting to use
WiKis to keep laboratory notebooks of their research; the FSAtom
WiKi is a group of chemists interested in atomic-scale simulations,
and so forth. As a collaborative phenomenon, its both sophisticated
enough to provide a rich environment, and simple enough that the
learning curve is not steep. And to revert to the opening sentence
of this post, RSS has been fully assimilated into some WiKis,
hence providing another link into data rich environments.
If you want to set one up, one place is http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/,
but you will need a PHP module (and probably a MySQL database)
as part of your web service. In this sense, like the Web, its a server/client
model with the former a single point of failure (or suppression). If anyone
knows of a peer2peer version, do let us know!
--
Henry Rzepa.
+44 (020) 7594 5774 (Voice); +44 (0870) 132 3747 (eFax)
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK.
Hi,
Noveber's MOTM is S-Adenosyl Methionine, which is an important biological
methylating agent. It was written by Rich Blatchly of Keene State
College, Keene, New Hampshire, USA, and comes as an HTMl-only web page.
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/Depts/Chemistry/MOTM/motm.htm#nov2003
Regards,
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Paul May, School of Chemistry, University of Bristol, UK
tel: +44 (0)117 928-9927 fax: +44 (0)117 925-1295
<mailto:paul.may@bris.ac.uk> Mobile: 07811371539
Home URL: <http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Chemistry/staff/pwm.htm>
Molecule of the Month: <http://www.bristol.ac.uk/Depts/Chemistry/MOTM/motm.htm>
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The site http://www.rnsoft.com/products/iewebfix/
describes a "fix" to Web pages necessitated by a court case Microsoft
has recently lost. Apparently it dates back to a patent on "in-lined" content
of the type produced in Web browsers by the <object>, <embed> and <applet>
pages. This patent was apparently infringed by Web browsers and Microsoft,
is having to preface each invocation of such content by some sort of disclaimer.
This will mean that pages having this sort of content will not display unless the
reader dismisses these dialogs.
This means that many of the pages written for chemical application, whereby
3D molecular coordinates, spectra etc are inlined into a page, will be disrupted
by the above procedures.
The solution is to replace the direct <object>, <embed> and <applet>
HYML codes by Javascript equivalents that write it out dynamically.
The above site provides a converter that does this, although one must
assume that many "legacy" pages will not be converted, and hence
will become "unviewable". This in the first instance on IE,
but it seems inevitable that other browsers will have to follow
suite.
This sorry saga reminds me of the attempts by I think BT to claim
that the hyperlink itself was covered by a patent, and the earlier GIF
saga whereby royalties on the compression algorithm were payable.
Whether this court case over the in-lined patent will do the chemistry
and science communities any good remains to be seen; whatever else,
it certainly will be disruptive.
--
Henry Rzepa. Imperial College, Chemistry Dept.
+44 0778 626 8220 +44 020 7594 5804 (Fax)
(Apologies for duplicate postings)
Colleagues,
We have updated our list of resources in combichem and high throughput
screening:
http://www.warr.com/ombichem.html
Details of the latest issue (August 2003) in our cheminformatics series of
reports are at
http://www.warr.com
Wendy
Dr Wendy A Warr
Wendy Warr & Associates, 6 Berwick Court
Holmes Chapel, Cheshire CW4 7HZ, England
Tel/fax +44 (0)1477 533837
wendy(a)warr.com http://www.warr.com
Dear Chemweb,
Thanks to Henry, I'm getting interested in the applications of RSS in
chemistry. It is sad that the chemistry societies don't make use of this
technology. Therefore I decided to try and "scrape" the content alert
emails that I get from ACS and convert them to RSS. It's still a proof
of concept, but you can find them at http://ivan.tubert.org/rss/ .
I know scraping is never a permanent solution, but sometimes it is
surprising how fast a vendor decides to provide a service when they see
how people are willing to go around them and do it on their own.
At least it will be useful for me, because I'll be able to aggregate it
with other sources of interest. If you think it's useful feel free to
use it. I may add more journals later.
Best regards,
Ivan