Simone, Fawzy and Luigi debate the virtues of different approaches to sharing germplasm information:
There are people who need and trust only the database type of information and others who are comfortable, productive and creative with more informal, network type of knowledge sharing. The fact is that the second type of user group has been heavily neglected in the past.
In which user group do you fall?
Well formulated by Simone! Information is in fact generated as something distributed and decentralized, and not at a centralized location. When we manage to get the web2 technology more user-friendly for the data consumers – then I think the former (database type) people will eventually be the neglected user group. Currently there is a little too much of a technology-wall with all the RDFs, persistent identifiers, service interface, etc for the breeder or crop scientist to penetrate the tech-wall and get to the data itself. When we tackle this, I think that social network type of knowledge sharing will quickly dominate over the centralized database type of information sharing.