Anthony Broad-Crawford

Currently, I belong to several social networking platforms.  This includes Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and soon to be released Twine, and Stack Overflow.  That is a lot of social networking platforms.  More importantly, as the industry trends to more specific social and professional networks, the number of networking platforms I belong to will increase. If the industry continues to proliferate at its current rate, I will probably belong  to around eleven or twelve sites over the next year.

The fact that I will belong to so many social / professional networking sites does not upset me.  In fact,  it is the exact opposite, it excites me. Each site will most likely provide an incredible amount of value specific to its vertical.  For example, I would love social networking sites specific to product development, start up life, software development, and management.  I would gain a tremendous amount if I could interact and collaborate with my peers in those specific areas.  However, what I don’t look forward to, is having to maintain so many versions of my profile.

The sheer amount of time it would take to maintain all my profiles, which are really alternate presentations of my resume, is daunting.   More importantly, as these sites specialize around professional areas, my need to keep my profiles accurate and current, increases.  That means, for each experience I want to add to my profiles, I will have to log into several sites and make the same change, over and over again.  This is clearly an annoyance.

I bring this up, as it is currently a problem with professional networking platform I manage.  We are a professional networking platform for the medical industry.  This includes physicians, researchers in the health sciences, nurses, and more.  Each of these users has an extremely rich profile that contains a lot of information.  Currently, our users note that maintaining these profiles even for their institutions is extremely time consuming.  So here we are asking them to create and maintain duplicate.  Additionally, we import and export these profiles in a format specific to the organization we are dealing with.  Meaning, per each organization we interface with, we translate our representation of the users  profile into a format the organization understands.  This isn’t very efficient for anyone involved.

Additionally, independent of our platform, the medical industry is starting to embrace cross institution online collaboration. These future platforms will have the same problem of multiple profiles, and no consistent way of sharing the information the same as ours.  Continuing to create multiple versions of the profile, and one off representations and communication protocols will not scale.

A single representation , communications protocol, and repository for a physicians profile is needed.  That being said, I am now venturing into creating a profile protocol and repository for the medical industry.  I am not going lone wolf, instead, I am getting involved in the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) project and the Data portability project.  I will look to spearhead the medical and scientific pieces.  I don’t know if these will be the final solutions, but it is where I am going to start.

As I progress, I will update through this blog.  Please stay posted.