data ecologies

almost three years ago now, i was able to get ed wilson, harold varmus, and jeff sachs to google to make a pitch for what we then called biosearch--a facility for biological information that would enable data from multiple fields to interact. not much came of that, though ed was one of the TED prizewinners for 2007, and his TED wish was the encyclopedia of life, now being built by the EOL consortium.

in any case, i've been following the discussions on bbgm for some time. i'm in violent agreement with this latest post about biological data production, consumption, and analysis, and it reminded me of a graphic representation we made to describe what biosearch would be (click on the image to get to a larger version).

i think it's a good general framework for thinking about what biological data management should look like. thoughts?