In last Friday's morning when I thought that "finally this batch of data has been analysed", a new idea came up. As different situations of species-abundance matrices and environmental variable matrices in ecological communities correspond to different analyses, to choose a analysis combination is somewhat an art, and often difficult for a beginner, but still a program can give proper advices according to results of preparatory tests.
So I thought of Google Analytics, an analytic tool, a web service for website managers. Since much data can be organized and analyzed with it, and real-time results in the forms of tables and figures (some items change daily) can be sent to users in time, analyses on ecological community data will not be a tough task.
For beginners, this system can give advices and provide corresponding ways to do it, from ANOVA to its nonparametric counterpart, from regression to correlation, from principle component analysis or factor analysis to correspondence analysis or detrended correspondence analysis, from redundancy analysis to canonical correspondence analysis or detrended canonical correspondence analysis, or else multi-dimensional scaling, no matter users believe "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." like Python, or "There's more than one way to do it." like Perl, they can get results in the way they prefer, as long as they have basic knowledge and master basic skills in this field - even not, a good user interface and detailed help files in the system can provide much help.
Rights of former algorithm and program developers should be protected. Google can pay for it with its AdSense profit, and the amount can be determined by agreements, but the service should be free to users, while users' privacies should be protected too. Data access should be controlled by users, falling to different secrecy categories.
As success of facebook reveals a trend of social networking service, web services of analytics may also benefit from social networking. With users' consentience, the system can synthesize data attained with same or varied protocols, after standardization and comparison. Community data and ecosystem data, as well as the analytic results and revelations can be situated on Google Earth. This may leads to global discoveries and conclusions.
How do we call this Google service on ecology? I suggest "Google Oikos".
17:03 2008-1-13
So I thought of Google Analytics, an analytic tool, a web service for website managers. Since much data can be organized and analyzed with it, and real-time results in the forms of tables and figures (some items change daily) can be sent to users in time, analyses on ecological community data will not be a tough task.
For beginners, this system can give advices and provide corresponding ways to do it, from ANOVA to its nonparametric counterpart, from regression to correlation, from principle component analysis or factor analysis to correspondence analysis or detrended correspondence analysis, from redundancy analysis to canonical correspondence analysis or detrended canonical correspondence analysis, or else multi-dimensional scaling, no matter users believe "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." like Python, or "There's more than one way to do it." like Perl, they can get results in the way they prefer, as long as they have basic knowledge and master basic skills in this field - even not, a good user interface and detailed help files in the system can provide much help.
Rights of former algorithm and program developers should be protected. Google can pay for it with its AdSense profit, and the amount can be determined by agreements, but the service should be free to users, while users' privacies should be protected too. Data access should be controlled by users, falling to different secrecy categories.
As success of facebook reveals a trend of social networking service, web services of analytics may also benefit from social networking. With users' consentience, the system can synthesize data attained with same or varied protocols, after standardization and comparison. Community data and ecosystem data, as well as the analytic results and revelations can be situated on Google Earth. This may leads to global discoveries and conclusions.
How do we call this Google service on ecology? I suggest "Google Oikos".
17:03 2008-1-13
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