Re: ANN: DataBasin 0.4

[Scott Christley]

On Nov 6, 2011, at 3:32 AM, Richard Stallman wrote:

>    It can become even more fuzzy as the instruments used for
>    observation combine both measurement and computation. These
>    devices are almost exclusively proprietary and expensive, so labs
>    must send genetic material to a company which performs the
>    measurement and computation, thus SaaS, for them. Doesn't sound
>    very much like freedom does it?
> 
> I am not sure.  Correct me if I have misunderstood, but I think the
> company is doing a physical measurement and then analyzing it,
> providing the analyzed result.  It seems that the computing is
> ancillary to the measurement itself.  If so, I would not say it is
> SaaS.

In my opinion, analysis in this context is computing and attempting to 
differentiate leads to a slippery slope, so if somebody wanted to sidestep the 
rules then they just declare their computation is "analysis".  For the 
high-throughput biological research I mentioned before, that "analysis" is 
critical to the interpretation and understanding of the physical measurements. 
So while such analysis may be ancillary, it really is required for extracting 
biological meaning from the data. One good thing is that I recently heard about 
the Polonator project (www.polonator.org) which seems dedicated to a providing 
a free software and hardware system. Regardless this still leaves the issue 
that significant computation, e.g. assembling millions of sequence reads into a 
genome, is beyond the capacity of the computers in a typical scientific 
laboratory, so investigators rely upon SaaS to do their research.

Scott