At the Intersection of Public-health Informatics and Bioinformatics: Using Advanced Web Technologies for Phylogeography

Web technologies that promote information-sharing and collaboration are known as Web 2.0.1. These technologies include the popular social networks and wikis, Web services (Web application programming interfaces [APIs] such as SOAP or REST) that support interoperability between computers,2 and mashup and workflow environments such as Yahoo! Pipes (Yahoo! Inc., Sunnyvale, CA USA) and Taverna (University of Manchester, Manchester, UK). Geospatial applications such as Google Earth (Google, Mountain View, CA USA) have facilitated visualization and analysis of geo-referenced data over the Web. Another advanced Web environment is the Semantic Web, which uses the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Ontology Web Language (OWL). These frameworks enable Web resources to be annotated and defined in a way that facilitates information-sharing and knowledge discovery.3,4

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