Are bioinformaticians doing e-Business?

Full publication details are as follows.

Mark Greenwood, Chris Wroe, Robert Stevens, Carole Goble, Matthew Addis: 2002, "Are bioinformaticians doing e-Business?" in "The Web and the GRID: from e-science to e-business", proceedings of Euroweb 2002, St Anne"s College, Oxford, UK, Dec 2002, Eds. Brian Matthews, Bob Hopgood, Michael Wilson, Electronic Workshops in Computer Science, British Computer Society ISBN 1-902505-50-6

Abstract

We have models of commerce in a Web setting: business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C). Now scientists commonly use Web based services to perform in-silico experiments. Thus we are prompted to ask the question "Are e-Scientists doing e-Business?". Do the infra-structure and models offered by e-Commerce support the activities e-Scientists need to perform? In this position paper we compare e-Science and e-Business using the discipline of bioinformatics. Such a comparison should inform the reuse of existing e-Business technologies in e-Science projects. We argue that the indiv idual e-Scientist is now demanding more than the simple web interfaces prevalent in consumer e-commerce. Indiv idual e-Scientists need to interact in a manner more akin to the B2B model than the B2C style previously used. We examine how the infrastructure prevalent in the B2B arena of e-commerce can be reused and extended to support the needs of today"s e-Scientists. We illustrate this argument with reference to the myGrid e-Science middleware project.

-- MarkGreenwood - 06 Jan 2003