Manuel Corpas' Blog

Genomes, Web 2.0 and Bioethics

New Year Resolution: Never Post The Same Announcement Again!

The iAnn project with its official website and services is now formally launched as of January 2012. iAnn is a collaborative environment for curation of scientific announcements. iAnn is a standard platform providing software, services and an in-house editor to annotate and disseminate announcement data into a network of external websites. iAnn’s modular viewer interface allows easy customization and integration of announcement data in external web applications.

Figure 1. Example of iAnn Announcement Service integrated in the British Society for Proteome Research Website.

iAnn increases access to announcements through its dissemination tools, which have been designed specifically to integrate posts across many different websites with minimal effort. iAnn allows reporting of events, courses or news to a central repository, which are then disseminated seamlessly to member scientific organizations or websites according to keywords, dates or geographical location. Forget about having to post your event or piece of news more than once for wide dissemination!

iAnn Community

Here is a list of organizations already benefiting from iAnn services. You can also be one of them:

How can one join iAnn?

Currently there are several ways in which an organization may join iAnn. They can join as 1) Sponsor, 2) Member or 3) Collaborator. These categories are based on their needs and chosen commitment to the platform.

  1. Sponsors usually have a priority for dissemination of the announcements and news. They are usually not involved in the curation process of announcements but contribute with funds to support iAnn’s centralized curation efforts.
  2. Members are interested in both curation and wide dissemination of their own announcements. Typical members include iAnn widgets in their websites to offer the communities they serve permanently up-to-date relevant announcement information. For example, the British Society for Proteome Research (BSPR), depicted in Figue 1, shows a list of all the anouncements BSPR is interested in displaying in its website.
  3. Collaborators are interested in posting announcements to the iAnn repository and helping us spread the word. In exchange we offer collaborators the ability to display iAnn announcements in their website for free.

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Filed under: iAnn, Marketing, , , , , , , , , ,

Scientific Announcements Don’t Get Noticed Where They Should

Wouldn’t it be nice if the event you are trying to promote needed to be posted only once? What if  there was a central repository for dissemination of announcements that was accessible and permanently up-to-date?  Wouldn’t it be great if your blog or website could show relevant professional announcements without having to enter them?

Unfortunately, people around the world are still trapped in the paper-based office paradigm when wanting to disseminate announcement information. Again and again they post their announcement to different places knowing that it will only reach a partial share of all potentially interested readers. They add data and clog online databases as no centralized repository is available for posting or getting information. Despite the great number of hours of work lost by millions of people trying to post, scientific organizations have been extremely slow to embrace community-shared announcement curation.

We (Rafael Jimenez and I) are promoting the creation of a community of organizations and people to lead iAnn, a centralized collaboration platform that coordinates curation efforts among scientific organizations. iAnn increases access to announcements through its dissemination tools, which have been designed specifically to integrate posts across many different websites with minimal effort. iAnn allows you to post your event, course, piece of news only once to a central repository, which is then disseminated seamlessly to relevant scientific organizations or websites according to keywords, dates or geographical location.

If you think iAnn is of interest to you please contact me (see contact information on the right) or wait for future developments that are about to come in Manuel Corpas’ Blog. Currently we are in a development phase for the project and would like to hear from potential users or scientific organizations if they have any thoughts or suggestions on the matter. Our aim is to change the way anyone posts and finds relevant information about any given professional field. iAnn promises to help many users keep up-to-date with relevant announcements more effortlessly. Perhaps from now on websites will be better able to have most of the events, courses, seminars, news, etc. that users would expect to find in them.

Filed under: Databases, iAnn, News, Technology, , , , ,

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Any views expressed here are the author's alone and do not necessarily form part of the official positions of his employer.

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