Mashups in medicine

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Contents

Introduction

See also Web 2.0

With so few mashups in medicine or health librarianship, this technology is considered experimental. That aside, there is considerable room for health librarians who want to try out their ideas by mashing digital information sources together. In terms of their philosophical or social orientation, mashups are linked to the idea of web 3.0 in that they bring together disparate sources of information to render greater meaning and utility to a new, third tool, while encouraging socialization, interaction and collaboration among web users. In bioinformatics, the notion of integrating data sources - which are in essence mashups - of particular biological entities is important because rather than searching all relevant sites sequentially they can be brought together in one metasearch efficiently.

What are mashups, exactly?

Mashups are hybrid tools that take the functionality of two information sources, merge certain aspects of each, to create a novel third source. (See mashup editors.) The popularity of mash-ups was first discussed in a 2005 issue of Business Week. (An example of a useful and popular mashup is Google maps, which takes Google Earth and merges it with telephone directory information.)

Mashups share in the web 2.0 notions of open, participative and collaborative content and build on technology that dates back to the web's early days. By using publicly-available, open-source code, mashups can be used to create current awareness tools, using RSS feeds and JavaScript, and tools that combine text and visual components. While mashups are experimental, they are worthy of examination by health librarians who want to explore creative methods of information delivery for their constituents.

Mashups in medicine

Even though the number and quality of mashups is increasing overall (see mashup awards 2007), notable mashups in health and medicine are few and far between. Many existing medical mashups utilize the Google maps api because of the visual aspect of web navigation. With only a few health mashups available, the following simple but representative examples offer health librarians some insight into where mashup technology is heading:

Avian flu mashup

The award-winning, animated Avian flu mashup that tracks the spread of the H5N1 (bird flu) virus worldwide at Nature with the help of the Google maps api. Follow the news of avian flu outbreaks around the world, and attempts by scientists, public health experts, policy makers, and governments to control its spread.

Biowizard

Although Biowizard's search engine PubMed Wizard conducts search results identical in style to PubMed, its design goes beyond traditional searching. PubMed Wizard allows users to save, share, rank, and discuss selected articles. Biowizard is also an online social network where researchers registered with an account can customize a personal profile on the Lab Wizard Network, list publications, share research interests, join groups, upload photos, and even chat live with others on the system. Biowizard encourages user participation and collaboration through its highly interactive forums, and features.

eTBLAST

eTBLAST is a text-similarity tool which extracts keywords from queries and weights them to identify a unique subset of the medical literature. A quantitative score is computed based on the above, which is a measure of similarity among the documents searched. eTBLAST outputs a list and ranks items by a similarity score. End users interact with this data as they do using dates, authors or journal name sorting methods in PubMed. The similarity-ranked lists help to compile lists to identify the most frequent and prominent authors in a given domain and the most frequent journals as targets for submission of publication rates over a period of time.

HEALTHMap

HEALTHMap brings different data sources together to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases, and their effects on human and animal health. It also combines the Google maps api, RSS feeds from different news sources, and Google News, ProMED, the World Health Organization and Euro Surveillance. Through an automated text processing system, the data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. HEALTHMap may be invaluable for health professionals and librarians who want to stay up-to-the minute with information on global health news.

HubMed

HubMed is an alternative search interface to PubMed incorporating external web services and providing functions to improve the efficiency of literature searching, browsing and retrieval. Users create and visualize clusters of related articles, export citation data in multiple formats, receive daily updates of publications in areas of interest, navigate links to full text and other related resources, retrieve data from formatted bibliographies, navigate citation links and store annotated metadata for articles of interest.

Twebinars

A twebinar is a web conference or seminar and Twitter mash-up where conversations take place in real-time before, during and after the webinar, on Twitter.

Vimo

Vimo is generally considered to be the first healthcare products and services mashup or integrated comparison-shopping portal. It was released in 2006, and allows U.S. businesses and consumers to research, rate and purchase health insurance and Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). In addition, it selects physician profiles from across the United States and brings a variety of private-public data sources together for health consumers. It allows users to read and post reviews about the health services and products available. By using Google map's application interface (API) technology, Vimo searches for the exact location of a health professional's office when users click names on the Google map. The Vimo example may offer some possibilities for Canadian health consumers.

Who is sick?

Who Is Sick was started in 2006 with a mission to provide current and local sickness information (an epidemiological mashup) in the Los Angeles area of the U.S. With the belief in the power of people and faith that user-generated content is valuable, this mashup links sickness "data" with maps of the region. Given the slow adoption of web 2.0 technologies by the healthcare industry, Who Is Sick is meant to be a simple, user-friendly prototype for health consumers who wish to see disease outbreaks geographically as they are occurring.

iSpecies - life sciences mashup

In the area of biology and zoology, iSpecies applies the notion of mash-up to the life sciences, as Declan Butler says in Nature. iSpecies is part of a growing movement where interfaces merge tools such as Google’s maps and scientific information, such as GenBank and UniProt. iSpecies already boasts an array of species, searchable by scientific or common name. (See ResearchBuzz!).

A search in iSpecies retrieves sequence data from NCBI, images from Yahoo and articles from Google scholar. It uses Touchgraph developed by HubMed and presents related articles as a spider diagram. Its developer authors iSpecies blog, and argues for further use of tags for images and metadata trawling, widening image search and ranking search results from different tools according to user criteria.

If barriers to accessing data are lifted and data can be placed in public databases, information can be accessed directly by search functions underpinning mashups. For example, Yahoo.ca is open to Google maps api data, which was initially blocked; Amazon now provides access to their data for those who want to experiment with mashups. More mashups in medicine are possible with open source tools and data, something health librarians can promote from their individual libraries and blogs.

Miscellaneous

Health libraries and full participation in Web 2.0

Many different types of health libraries face a number of challenges in order to fully participate in the creation of information sources in web 2.0. One is finding the time to learn about web 2.0 while keeping up to quickly-advancing search technologies and publishing trends. That said, whether health librarians can adopt new technologies in order to move hospital and health libraries into the future - and strengthen relationships with users - is an important question open to debate. Clearly, some of these technologies will not, over the long term, survive.

Some librarians have argued that hospitals discourage and prohibit web 2.0 tools from being used on their computer networks. Because host institutions have control over new web technologies, due to protection of data for privacy issues, medical libraries are often limited in their adoption and use of new software. Hospital firewalls block multimedia, and do not permit their use on library computers; thus, there are a number of libraries that cannot create their own intranet (or internet) library web pages. Because librarians are sometimes required to use an institutional content management system that prevents users from viewing and editing, some assert that hospital librarians feel their institution actively prevents technological progress in the interest of data security.

Canadian context

There is considerable potential to use mashup technology to create unique, Canadian sources of health information. At the moment, there does not seem to be either an academic doing experimental work in this area, or a health librarian doing research on mashups.

Mashup editors

Several mashup platforms help users create mashups. Here are some examples:

2008-2009 Developments

Dr. Raymond Yee see his wiki, from the UC Berkeley School of Information, is the originator of the phrase "gather, create, share" and known for his work on the Scholar's Box. His 2008 book is called Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services. It has an accompanying blog, Mashup Guide which also has some material from the book, including a table of contents.

The overall thrust of the book is:

  1. what can be done with no programming
  2. programming of one system (through its API)
  3. figuring out how to combine 2 or several systems
  4. creating "service composition frameworks" for combining arbitrary systems.

The book is grounded in "practical interoperability" (a grab-what-we-can-from-wherever approach) while moving toward larger unification efforts such as achieving the semantic web.

References

  1. Ankolekar A, Krötzsch M, Tran T, Vrandecic D. The two cultures: mashing up web 2.0 and the semantic web. Proceedings 16th International Conference on World Wide Web.
  2. Butler D. Mashups mix data into global service. Nature 2006 439, 6-7.
  3. Cho A. An introduction to mashups for health librarians. JCHLA/JABSC 2007;28(1):19-21.
  4. Eaton AD. HubMed: a web-based biomedical literature search interface.
  5. Errami M, Wren JD, et al. eTBLAST: a web server to identify expert reviewers, appropriate journals and similar publications.
  6. Hof RD. Mix, Match, And Mutate. Business Week.
  7. Kraft M. Library 2.0 theory: Web 2.0 and its implications for libraries. Krafty Librarian Blog.
  8. Open Source GIS - http://www.opensourcegis.org/
  9. Programmable Web (2006). Mash-up Feed. http://www.mashupfeed.com/
  10. ResearchBuzz. iSpecies, Living Thing Roundup Engine.
  11. Page R. iSpecies blog. http://ispecies.blogspot.com/
  12. Wheeler S, Kamel Boulos MN. Mashing, burning, mixing and the destructive creativity of Web 2.0: applications for medical education. RECIIS—Electronic Journal of Communication, Information and Innovation in Health 2007;1:27–33
  13. Wikipedia. Mashups. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup
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