14 June, 2009

A view of the world from Ensembl

Following our recent post updating you with feedback from our recent user survey, I wanted to share with you the following data. I've been data mining our web logs to get a picture of worldwide access to Ensembl (this is page impressions) and I put them on a heat map representing access to our browser (this doesn't include either BioMart or direct access of our public databases). I filtered out commercial IP addresses (i.e. all those .com, and .net) to simplify the analysis. Countries are shaded according to how much they accessed the Ensembl browser in the month of May. Dark countries use the Ensembl browser more, light countries, less. And this is what you get:

Heat map May 2009

Can you see your country here? If not, consider running a browser workshop in order to join our wide community of Ensembl users!

This map should help us to monitor the success of our workshops (at this moment I'm writing this from Venezuela which hopefully should appear in future heat maps!) Although there are still some gaps in the map, we are happy to see that Ensembl is used globally and our efforts are recompensed. Training leads to more in depth understanding of how to use the browser, and we think our worldwide workshops are helpful in using Ensembl to guide and enhance research.

Greetings from Venezuela, or as you would say here... ¡Hasta la próxima

Xosé

2 comments:

Paul. said...

Now what happens if you normalise by population size?

Xose said...

Paul,

I'm in Venezuela training and don't have the time to play with this data... I might, however, be able to do this on my way to Korea (next series of workshops), if so, I'll publish another post (but cannot promise). Anyway, answering your question I would guess, that 'normalising by population size', our list instead of USA, Germany and UK..., it would say Iceland, Luxembourg and Estonia...

With my post didn't attempt to provide a snapshot of the world's effort in genomics, I simply wanted to show that Ensembl goes beyond Europe...

Anyway, you could argue, why population size? Why not GDP? Or what about taking into account the national R&D investment? There could be many possible iterations...
Cheers,
Xosé