BioTorrents: A BitTorrent Tracker Site for Scientists
An article in zeropaid.com amplified the news about BioTorrents, a BitTorrent tracking and repository site created by researchers at the Genome Center of the University of California Davis, announced earlier in April in PLoS One (BioTorrents: A File Sharing Service for Scientific Data).
If you are a denizen of digital bazaar known as BitTorrent, this latest development in scientific data sharing was inevitable, given the expected desire of open science advocates to share large amounts of data faster and more reliably.
If you have heard the term BitTorrent associated with illegally-distributed music or full-length videos, time to re-orient your thinking to legitimate data transfer needs. The basic function of BitTorrent is to break up a large data set into small pieces, allowing sharing among computers with full copies or partial copies of the dataset. The peer-to-peer network architecture bypasses inaccessible sources and takes advantage of decentralization, and, ultimately, time saving.
BioTorrents automatically tracks popular data sets, as well as features finding, sharing, and commenting of bioscience torrents, organized by browsing science content categories, sharing license types , and text searching. Google is also fed metadata to allow discovery of shared datasets and find descriptions on the BioTorrents site. Here is today’s picture of the pioneers for this sharing concept:
