Information Services: Myth or Silver Bullet?

Abstract

In the Web we are drowning in data, but we are starving for useful information. Information services aim to deal with this problem by providing domain- and application-specific organization, search, and presentation of data in the web. Although information services provide for the management of data, their main objectives are to:

• promote the sharing of information and related knowledge in the Web

• provide customized/tailored information search and delivery that addresses the needs of specific user communities

There many examples of information services that are currently available in the Web. The panel discussed sample information services for various science-related disciplines, including Biochemistry (e.g., GenBank, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genbank/ GenbankOverview. html; fMRIDC, http://www.fmridc.org/f/fmridc; Flytrap, http://www. fly-trap.org; and the Protein Data Bank,http://www.pdb.org/pdb/home/home.do), and Astronomy (NASA’s SkyView, http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/; Astronomical Image Library version 2.0, http://www.astronomy.ca/images/; OMNIweb, http://omniweb.gsfc. nasa.gov/ow.html; EU’s ESO Science Archive Facility, http://archive.eso.org/cms/; and the Sloan Digital Sky Server, http://cas.sdss.org/astro/en/).