Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG), UK, has announced the next stage in the evolution of its innovative 'Workbench' development platform. NPG is inviting the community to develop customised applications ('widgets') to search, discover and share scientific information. The Workbench development platform is built on OpenSocial technology - as used by, among others, iGoogle. NPG declared its Workbench officially 'open' for new widgets at the OpenSocial Europe Summit in the Netherlands.
NPG launched its Workbench environment on Nature Network in May 2010. The Workbench is a configurable webpage on Nature Network that users can customise by selecting, removing and moving widgets that can be used as tools for common online research activites. Scientists and developers are now invited to develop and submit their own widgets for Workbench.
As a demonstration of the Workbench, NPG has developed some widgets of its own, and has also worked with other organisations to develop some examples. These include a search widget for the nature.com site, semantic searching (powered by the Novoseek search engine), myExperiment - for browsing and sharing scientific workflows, a video player for nature.com videos, as well as a selection of bioinformatics tools, i.e. PCR amplification and a protein to DNA converter.
The global publisher has also been active in promoting and delivering the use of application programming interfaces (APIs), enabling developers to add value to the process of scientific communication. These include well-established APIs to access Connotea, NPG's online bookmarking service, and OpenSearch APIs, launched in 2009. NPG's OpenSearch APIs allow remote searching of the nature.com platform, returning results in a format that can be reused and redisplayed. An API is available for nature.com blogs, NPG's community-run science blog tracking and indexing service. In addition, nature.com RSS feeds are available for use by widget developers. RSS feeds include free-to-access news and features hosted on the Nature News site.
NPG encourages active collaboration and contributions from scientists and web developers alike. The Workbench can be found on Nature Network at network.nature.com/workbench. Developers interested in finding out more about developing widgets with NPG should visit the Workbench blog at blogs.nature.com/workbench.
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