Abstract
“The only way to ride on top of the information tidal wave is through continued education, which is the mission of ALA and every issue of JALA.
This special issue of JALA is dedicated to informatics in research and development (R&D) and education. Being heavily involved in informatics-related issues on a daily basis, my decision to organize a JALA issue around the topic of informatics seemed to be a quite natural one. However, given the wide spectrum of informatics-related R&D, deciding on which articles to include in this issue was not easy at all. Questions like “Should I pick one particular branch of informatics, such as Bioinformatics, and dedicate the whole issue to it?” went through my mind. Given the wide variety of backgrounds of the JALA readership, I finally decided not to focus this edition on any one particular area. As a result, this issue features a wide variety of articles, ranging from theoretical and applied informatics all the way to informatics in higher education. So, even if you are not an informatics person, you should still be able to find a few articles of interest in this issue.
Before I briefly outline the content of this issue, I first would like to challenge you to define the word informatics for yourself. Having worked in various areas of informatics myself, I have encountered numerous definitions over the years. For example, if you were to Google for a definition, you would get well over 535,000 hits. Webster defines informatics as “The sciences concerned with gathering and manipulating and storing and retrieving and classifying recorded information.” The definition that I still remember from back in my graduate school days went like this: “Informatics is the science of automated information processing.” Either way, most people associate the term with software and/or some form of information processing. Because of the overwhelming amount of data being generated nowadays, and the continuing trend of exponential data growth every year, informatics has become an essential survival tool in virtually all industries. The only way to ride on top of the information tidal wave is through continued education, which is the mission of ALA and every issue of JALA.
This issue of JALA provides a brief overview of selected informatics topics in R&D, industry, standardization, and academia. For example, Jonathan S. Lindsey and James M. Dixon (North Carolina State University) describe an experimental planner for parallel, multidirectional searches using an automated chemistry workstation. In a second article, both authors also discuss the performance of search algorithms in the examination of chemical reaction spaces using an automated chemistry workstation. Martin M. Echols, David K. Smith, and David S. Nirschl (Bristol-Myers Squibb Company), on the other hand, report on a Web-based instrument monitoring system. Douglas Perry (Indiana University) provides an overview of laboratory informatics and its role in higher education. On the application side, Roger McIntosh (Perkin Elmer, Inc.) describes open source tools for distributed device control within a service-oriented system architecture. Gary Kramer, Anh Dao Thi Nguyen, John C. Travis, Melody V. Smith (National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST), Akyut Arslan, and Reinhold Schäfer (University of Applied Sciences Wiesbaden, Germany) contributed an article on molecular spectrometry data interchange applications for NIST's SpectroML. This JALA issue also features an article by Paul Rodziewicz (ReTiSoft), in which he provides an overview of a Java integration framework, a hybrid scheduler system, and a Web-enabled laboratory information management system (LIMS). On the theoretical side, Reinhold Schäfer (University of Applied Sciences Wiesbaden, Germany) outlines the underlying concepts for a dynamic laboratory scheduler, and Burkhard Schäfer (University of Kaiserslautern, Germany), Gary Kramer, and Dominik Poetz (NIST) provide an introduction to generating laboratory workflow documentation using ASTM's emerging Analytical Information Markup Language (AnIML) standard.
In closing, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all authors, reviewers, the JALA editorial board, and the JALA staff for their very valuable contributions and support of this special informatics issue of JALA.
Sincerely,
