Bill,
I haven't "conveniently forgotten" history. In fact I
mentioned further down in my message that you responded to that one of
commercial developers primary means of adding value to software has
been in putting better interfaces on academic software. This is
common knowledge.
As to whether or not the software industry has done "enough
research," that also is not the main issue in my previous message. In
many industries the cutting edge research is taken from academic labs;
what's surprising about that??!! **NOWHERE** have I expressed
opposition to NCBI playing a role in furthering research in sequence
analysis. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, are any of the companies
concerned about NCBI competing with them in the research arena. I
think that most and probably all of them would **love** to be able to
repackage and sell NCBI's research output. This is only possible,
however, if companies do the interface work and can provide other
value-added services, e.g. technical support/documentation. The
primary point that I made in my response to Tom, you glossed over with
the statement
"material about interface design deleted"
It's very easy to appear to score debating points when you ignore the
other person's argument.
Your response is merely setting up and knocking down straw men
because I clearly **agreed** with NCBI's research role. The **main
point** that I tried to make was that NCBI should not be in the user
------------------
interface toolkit business.
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The only attempt to respond to this was your example of other
commercial developers not improving Medline access over the years.
Perhaps so, I haven't reviewed the various Medline tools personally.
However, I think that it is pretty clear that programs that have
advanced beyond command line interfaces such as MacVector, Geneworks,
PCGENE, DNA* etc., have put a lot of effort into making sequence
analysis software more accessible to the scientist working at the lab
bench. Thus the fact that a different set of companies may not have
improved on Medline access seems much less relevant to the sequence
analysis field.
Sincerely,
Dave Kristofferson
GenBank Manager
kristoff at genbank.bio.net
