The Search Principle blog

I hope you and your families have a peaceful and happy holiday. See you in 2008. – Dean

Web 3.0 and medicine: make way for the semantic web. BMJ 2007;335:1273-1274

One of the benefits of reading broadly on new information technologies, and taking tentative steps in figuring out their impact in library work, is that I have been able to confirm a dichotomy between web 3.0 and the semantic web. My admission, coming on the heels of an invited editorial in the BMJ, may be no surprise to most people who read various tech blogs but it was important for me to determine it for myself.

In medicine, there is virtually no discussion about web 3.0 (see this PubMed search for web 3.0 (zero results) and most of the discussion on the semantic web (see this PubMed search – ~100 results) is from the perspective of biology/ bioinformatics.

The dichotomy in the literature is both perplexing and unsurprising. On the one hand, semanticists are looking at a new intelligent web as ‘added meaning‘ to documents, and machine interoperability. On the other, web 3.0 advocates use ‘3.0’ to be trendy, hip or to market themselves or their websites. That said, I prefer the web 3.0 label to the semantic web because it follows web 2.0 and suggests continuity.

I welcome my medical librarian colleagues to begin to discuss these concepts, and to raise their users’ awareness of them. Web 2.0 may seem short-lived, but we can build on this period to implement changes in the way that the web is used for information management in medicine.

At the very least, medical librarians should start to get in on the conversation.

In writing the BMJ editorial, I tried to list the different features of web 2.0 and 3.0, and came up with a few obvious points of comparison. What else should be added?

web 2.0…………………………………………web 3.0

. ‘the document web’ ………………………..‘the data web’
. information abundance …………………….information control
. controversial ……………………………… no less controversial
. ‘the social web …………………………… ‘the intelligent web’
. the second decade 2000-2009 …………. the third decade 2010-2020
. Google as catalyst ……………………….. Semantic web companies as catalyst
. wisdom of the crowds ……………………. wisdom of the expert
. mashups, fragmentation ………………… integration, new mashup tools
. search, search, search …………………. why search, when you can find?
. Pagerank …………………………………… ontologies, semantic systems
. lawless, anarchic ………………………….. standards, protocols, rules
. print and digital …………………………….. digital above all else
. I search, therefore I am ……………………I find, therefore I create

Here’s a challenge: write a succinct editorial for the British Medical Journal of less than 1000 words. Discuss web 3.0. Try to avoid too many acronyms (ie. FOAF, OWL – Web Ontology Language, RDF, W3) and/or technological jargon. Define terms clearly for a general audience. Somehow describe the differences between web 2.0 and 3.0, the semantic web and 3.0 and make your ideas relevant to physicians.

This year’s BMJ editorial was the most difficult one for me to write but I think it’s the one that will have the most influence. I really take my potshots at Google, while promoting medical librarians.

A brief quote to whet the seasonal appetite:

“…access to endless reams of unorganized information shifts the emphasis and online habits of physicians in web 2.0 to searching, not finding. Consequently, medical librarians believe that better pathways for information retrieval are badly needed as we move into web 3.0. [3,4] Finding reliable information has become increasingly difficult, not just in medicine, but in several other disciplines as well. Google’s search results are now emblematic of a larger problem, and duplicated at Yahoo and other search engines. As a result, medical librarians are pointing physicians back to their trusted sources, such as PubMed, Clinical Evidence and the Cochrane Library. We can expect this problem to worsen, unless better channels of information are created ….”

Dean,
I was looking forward to your explanation as to why Google Scholar would be the end to Web 2.0, which you promised would be in this list of the top benefits of Google.

A Devoted follower of the Googlescholar blog

Posted by Pauli at December 4, 2007 7:15 AM

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Hi Pauli,
Nice attention to details, by the way. What Google scholar has done is bring scholars and academics onto the web for their work in a way that Google alone did not. This has led to a greater use of social software and the rise of Web 2.0. For all its benefits, Web 2.0 has given us extreme info-glut which, in turn, will make Web 3.0 (and the semantic web) necessary.

I’ll be writing about this in the next BMJ editorial in December. Watch for it, Dean

1. Google scholar is a reliable search tool to browse/access [some of] the academic literature. Is it the best free tool we have? Well, it’s really the only general free tool for academic literature that we have, in an easy-to-use familiar interface.

2. Between regular (or Mother) Google and Google scholar, all websites, journal publishers crawled and made searchable – endusers can search about 100,000,000,000 items (yes, billion) discreet files, pages and journal articles. (On the academic side only, I’d guess that Google scholar searches around 500 million items).

3. Google scholar is a handy tool to locate [some of] the open-access and grey literature. However, its American-bias is unfortunate, and its quality controls need improvement. (This is where librarians need to focus their efforts in teaching.)

4. Google scholar provides access to unique content not in other search tools. (Unfortunately, searchers are advised to try both Google & Google scholar because there is unique academic content in both.)

5. Google scholar is still free and openly-accessible. It is now a part of the academic librarian’s toolbox (but requires contextualization for end-users to understand its limitations.)

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Related posts:

I. Top Five (5) Problems with Google Scholar – Three Years Later.

II. Google Scholar Turns Three, Unceremoniously.

According to the eDrugSearch list, American health librarian Michelle Kraft – aka “Krafty” – is 28th, and easily the most-read medical (& hospital) librarian blog on the Web. The UBC Google scholar blog (29th) is a niche blog, focussed on search-related issues, but I too am a medical-hospital librarian.

A notable exception in the top thirty is the health information specialist David Rothman (16th) who is a keen watcher of information technologies, social software and innovative websites as they pertain to medicine and healthcare.

It would be interesting to include other prominent medical librarians on the eDrug listing of top blogs, including our colleagues in Europe. So, why not submit your blog? The ranking seems fair, and it raises the profile of medical librarians. (Thanks to Suzan Zagar, web specialist, for today’s screenshot.)

1. Three years in beta, with no end in sight (to beta). Beta is not one of your more endearing qualities, Google Scholar. Still, you have become essential to the academic enterprise Google scholar – my question is: how did you do it?

2. Academic librarians have guessed about your content until we’re stressed. Still, we don’t know what sources Google Scholar includes/crawls/indexes – or how often the database is updated. Harumph. Tut, tut, Anurag.

3. Standards and quality controls in Google Scholar are the pits. Name authority is non-existent. Cited-by counts are terribly inflated. Note to self: always search Web of Science as well as Google Scholar for cited searching.

4. Google Scholar cannot be recommended for literature reviews. Use it to browse or to search for a known-item. Search it to supplement proper literature reviews in your best databases.

5. Google Scholar may just be the cause/reason why Web 2.0 is coming to an end. You’ll have to wait until the Top Five (5) Benefits of Google Scholar are published to know what I mean by that comment.

“Hopefully, Google Scholar will come out from its beta in a much shorter time, disclose the sources covered and fill the gaps to provide an excellent free tool for scholarly information
discovery and retrieval.” – Peter Jacso, Online Information Review (2005)

Few information technologies in recent memory have generated as much disagreement and debate as Google Scholar. For some, even the negative attention has been unjustified. Since its release in November 2004, Google Scholar has been sharply and justly criticized (Jacso 2005, 2006), dismissed as a clinical search tool (Henderson, 2005) and evaluated rigorously by a respected health librarian (Vine, 2006). However, the perspicacious Jacso does get the award for his perceptive critiques of GS, and even the distinction for one of the most amusing titles “Dubious hit counts and cuckoo’s eggs” from a 2006 article.

The early heady days of Google Scholar – as librarians from across the library community debated GS’ significance in library work (Quint, 2004) – has given way to a quieter acceptance of the search tool. Debates at some academic libraries are no longer about whether Scholar should be used to deliver academic reference services, or if it is a worthy federated search tool (comparable to Metalib, for example), but in what context it can be recommended by librarians. That’s a far cry from its initial dismissal and sharp attack from heaver hitters like Jacso, Henderson and Vine.

So where are we now with Google scholar? Has the tool lived up to its early hype? What improvements have been made to Scholar in the past year? Where does it stand now with respect to its deficiencies noted early on? I’ll be exploring these and other questions over the next week as I review Google scholar and its place in academic-scholarly searching. Stay tuned. – Dean Giustini

On NOVEMBER 21, 2007, the editors of Open Medicine will be celebrating the journal’s remarkable success to date in Toronto, Canada and will be coming together with members of our community – such as Richard Smith – to raise awareness and support for the future of the Journal. If you are in the Toronto area – why not attend?

Contact me if you wish to attend, especially if you are a librarian.