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Flexible Science Databases with OWW

I recently came across the desire/need for a flexible database system in my research (bioinformatics). For example, I want to know about phage gene expression. Not knowing enough biology to perform an efficient literature search (coming from a physics background), I have made a little database that allows me to input author name, citation info, abstract, and some relevancy measure while I search in the literature. (For the specific implementation, please visit PubMed Searches for Phage Gene Expression.)

The point that this little example illustrates is the creative use of small, easily customizable databases in scientific investigations. Accumulation of litearature search results is one example (you can see that common citation managers like EndNote are just specific, albeit not very flexible views of a literature database), but you can imagine many more, from entering specific observations from experiments, to bioinformatic data collection, ... The goal is some flexible framework where it is easy to create and modify databases on the fly, with nice user interfaces for database entry.

Which is why I bring this discussion to OWW. There are a couple of ways to do this. The easiest method (almost available) comes from Wufoo (used in the example above). I have been using this recently with a beta-key and it has many nice features, but I think something could be made that is more geared towards scientists (and when released, Wufoo will require a monthly fee). I am wondering if this could be done in the framework of a wiki such as OWW. I imagine a scenario where through template features, users could easily define fields in a database in wikimarkup. Once this is done, pages would be generated to allow data input, as well as retrieval (dumps in CSV format, or even automatically formatting a wiki table ...)

This idea is more along the lines of the Science 2.0 article, but I think it would be very useful, could be integrated into many aspects of scientific investigation, and could be implemented in something like OWW.

--Lucks 17:45, 24 March 2006 (EST)

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