Web 2.0 and the Dental Informatics Online Community

ABSTRACT:

Web 2.0 is a term describing web applications which facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the Web. This presentation will outline some new trends like Google Wave and Google Social Search and will then attempt to showcase how the Dental Informatics Online Community applies these to its specific goals. Participants will learn about the status of this NLM-funded project during a live demonstration. The challenges and opportunities of e-communities, including how to attract and retain a critical mass of participants and how to foster active participation, will be explored. In addition, the plans of the project team on how to build the richest, most up-to-date and comprehensive information resource on dental informatics will be discussed. The presentation will conclude with a (hopefully) lively exchange of ideas on how Web 2.0 can help researchers to form collaborations.

Dr. Heiko Spallek is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Dental Informatics at the School of Dental Medicine, University of Pittsburgh with secondary appointments in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and the School of Information Sciences. He is a fellow of the ADEA Leadership Institute. In 1993, he graduated from the School of Dentistry, Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. He continued his career at Humboldt and was appointed as a faculty member in the Department of Periodontology and also received his PhD in the field of dental material sciences. Since 1996, he has been working in the emerging discipline of Dental Informatics. In 2000, he earned an MSBA with a concentration in Computer and Information Science from the Fox School of Business and Management, Temple University, Philadelphia. His research has as its focus the development of Web-based educational resources for dental professionals and the creation of online research communities. His projects have a foundation in the fields of education, usability engineering, medical and dental informatics and computer science. He leads an NLM funded research team for the development of the Dental Informatics Online Community--an open, worldwide community for dental informatics research which is intended to facilitate the development of research projects and the collaborations that support them (http://www.dentalinformatics.com).
He co-authored the book "The Global Village of Dentistry" which was published in Germany and in the US. He has served as member of the Working Group Steering Committee of the American Medical Informatics Association and as chair of the Dental Informatics Working Group. He also served as consultant to the Office of the Chief Dental Officer, Department of Health, United Kingdom. Heiko is actively involved in the development of the medical subspecialty "Clinical Informatics." He is founding partner and a principal of S3 Web Technologies, LLC, an Internet services and consulting company for the dental and medical markets.