[LIS-Forum] interview with David Lipman

Fri Feb 3 18:19:53 IST 2006

Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2006 16:55:07 +0530 (IST)
From: Subbiah Arunachalam <arun at mssrf.res.in>

Friends:

Here is an interview with David Lipman. Very relevant to all of us in the
field of bioinformatics (and new biology in general). I wish to draw your
attention especially to the last question. his main thrust is increase the
availability of CONTENT on the open web. A great boost for open access!

Arun
[Subbiah Arunachalam]

Interview with David Lipman

Juan Carlos Perez, Searching for Answers: NCBIs David Lipman, Bio-IT
World, February 1, 2006. Excerpt:
David Lipman [is the] director of the National Center for Biotechnology
Information, part of the National Library of Medicine, which hosts various
life sciences databases, including the PubMed scientific literature
database....
Some people view Google, etc., as increasingly useful research tools in
the life sciences, joining PubMed and other established services. What is
your opinion?

Lipman: People sometimes have this a bit backwards. The primary point is
that there is a huge amount of information on the Web. The best way to
make the Web more useful for research and education is to get more
information out there. What we find on our site is that the more
good-quality content that we add to a resource, the more it is being used.
If you have more gene sequencing data, you have more searching. If you
have more full text in PubMed Central, you have more searching. While I
want to give MSN and Yahoo and Google a lot of credit for doing a good
job, the reality is that if there wasnt content there, it wouldnt matter
how good those search engines were. And if the search engines were a
little less good than they were, you would still be getting to a lot of
good content... And if those search engines got better, it wouldnt make
as much of a difference as if there was more good peer-reviewed medical
content. That would make a bigger impact....

Are you talking about identifying search patterns from users so you can
surface links they might be interested in?

If you did a search on, say, Alzheimer's disease, and you find a PubMed
record that looks interesting to you 
 right now you go to that page and
we may have done an incredible amount of work to link that up to all kinds
of things  to information about genes that might be involved, to genetic
versions of it, to related articles. And the reality is you have to poke
around to see that  its sort of hidden in a way. What well do instead
is, using computational tools, poke around for you and then put them right
on the record....The bottom line for us is discovery. We want people to
make discoveries....

Is there a specific initiative tied to these improvements?

Yes. I call it the Discovery Initiative. Its something new. Its been
percolating. Last summer, I went out to visit Google and Amazons A9
[search engine] and the folks from Microsofts MSN came to visit. I also
went up to Boston to meet with folks from the major hospitals there and
MIT and Harvard. Weve really been giving this a lot of thought. In many
ways, we have had great success. Lots of people use the site and 2.25
terabytes of data are downloaded from our site everyday. And yet I find it
very frustrating because weve connected up the scientific information in
very precise and powerful ways: a protein structure to the chemical its
bound to, to genetic data, you name it. All that is connected up. And yet
very few of our users do more than very simple things with our site....We
want them to find answers to questions they didnt even know they had.
They can do that. People who are really experts at using this site can
make discoveries almost on demand....Weve always been working on making
incremental improvements, but now Im talking about something that is a
more powerful shift. Im hoping that without the users having to think
about having to learn anything different, theyll be able to take
advantage of databases they didnt know about and [make] connections
between things they dont have to ask for anymore. This is a new phase.