In Techcrunch, they point at RareShare, a a community site for people with rare medical condition. I will briefly quote part of the article:

 ”shared some of it most recent growth data with us and the results are impressive. Since launching over the summer, the site has grown each month by between 35%-50%, and now has over 700 communities associated with different disorders. Given the nature of the site, the numbers are bittersweet, but it’s nice to know that so many people are finding others they can connect with”.

To me, this is very similar to what I was saying about Health 2.0 recently, the potential of social networks for people with particular health conditions is still unleashed. The article also notes that communities can gather in standalone sites of a specific disease, but RareShare is a starting point for an umbrella.

Illustration by Nick Dewar

I have always thought that Health was one of those domains where people did not want to mingle and talk about, because privacy is a concern and also it belongs to the very intimate dimension.

However, after reading this “Health 2.0: Patients as Partners” Business Week article , I changed my mind a bit. Social Networks such as PatientsLikeMe, SugarStats, Disaboom and Trusera, show a different viewpoint where people can share their thoughts. Why not having a similar initiative in Spain?

I believe that a definitely interesting-to-see and wonderful promising initiative is the one led by my colleague and friend Miguel Angel Mayer (apart from his incredible CV, just check it out, envy, envy, he is a wonderful person),   the Web Medica Acreditada (WMA, something like “Certified Medical Web”). Fundamentally, this initiative helps to verify and certify the huge amount of information that exists on the Web by ensuring the quality of the content.

I strongly believe this is tremendously necessary in a world where patients are a click from all kind of information in such a sensitive domain. An initiative like the one led by Miguel Angel is a must.

We are having a presentation at the Jornadas de Servicios Web (JSWEB 07) , the Spanish conference for Web Services in the context of the Congreso Español de Informatica (CEDI), Spanish Computer Science Congress in Zaragoza, next week.

This presentation is about the Biomedical Information Integration and Discovery with Semantic Web Services (BIRD) platform,a joint work with UAM and UM about which I have talked here and here.

Mariano Rico (UAM) will present it and I am pretty sure we will get strong feedback and hopefully some good new ideas to kick on research on that direction.

Apart from a number of the PROFIT and FP7 proposals, this week was a quite an important one for an initiative, we were working for a while. Together with my colleagues and friends, Mariano Rico (UAM) and Paco García Sanchez (UM), two great and very promisingresearchers, we submitted our paper about the Biomedical Information Integration and Discovery with Semantic Web Services (BIRD), a platform to locate and integrate biomedical information from various sources.

Here comes the abstract of the paper:

“Biomedical research is now information intensive; the volume and
diversity of new data sources challenges current database
technologies. The development and tuning of database technologies
for biology and medicine will maintain and accelerate the current
pace for innovation and discovery. New promising application
fields such as the Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services can
leverage the potential of biomedical information integration and
discovery, facing the problem of semantic heterogeneity of
biomedical information sources in a variety of storage and data
formats widely distributed both across the Internet and within
individual organizations. In this paper, we present BIRD, a
fully-fledged biomedical information integration solution that
combines natural language analysis and semantically-empowered
techniques to ascertain how the user needs can be best fit. Our
approach is backed with a proof-of-concept implementation where
the breakthrough and efficiency of integrating the biomedical
publications database PubMed, the Database of Interacting Proteins
(DIP) and the Munich Information Center for Protein Sequences
(MIPS) has been tested.”

I think BIRD is a very good idea. Since its inception, it addresses a key need of biomedical researchers: interoperation among the very different information sources such as genes, proteins and micro-array data that need to be gathered all over the Web. Let´s hope the article outcomes into a succesful proposal to make it happen at a higher level.