The idea has been lingering in the air for a long time now: sharing large science data sets using bittorrent.\nOver the past couple of years I have seen a lot of science related software being distributed over torrents, and the use in open source in general is abundant.\nGiven a good network of so-called seeders, download times go down dramatically, and the overall energy consumption goes down too, as data has to follow a much\nshorter path.
\n\nIt could very well be that the uptake of this technology for sharing data is only now coming about because only recently we started caring about Open Data\nlicenses, which formally take care of rights of redistribution, which is obviously crucial to setting up a torrent network. Initiatives like the\nPanton Principles are changing this, even though we had a good deal of\nOpen Source-licensed data for many years already.
\n\nSo, with an increasing amount of Open Data, the time was now right, according to the authors Morgan and\nJonathan, to set up BioTorrents, and publish a paper in PLoS ONE: BioTorrents: A File Sharing Service for Scientific Data\n(doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010071). I have to admit, that I do not particularly like the design of\nthe website, and I think it could do with more social web integration, but importantly, they provide a tracker. Trackers are key parts (well, they\nare being made obsolete, though I am not up-to-date with the state of that evolution), and work as a service discovery hub. Additionally, the\nwebsite gives means to find data, and allow categorising torrents.
\n\nIt is worth nothing that the uptake has been minimal so far, since the idea was posted last October.\nBut it is slowly being picked up, or at least blogged\nabout.
\n\nThe success of BioTorrent will very much depend on the user base. This is common to social web applications, and a recent accidental loss of\ntorrents is unforgivable; well, personally, I was happy to upload my torrent once more, but would\nnot have done that if I had many torrents uploaded already. Torrent content is distributed, but the tracker information is not. Backup, backup,\nbackup. Oh, and backup :) It happens to the best of us. Additionally, it is worth realising that the service needs to give something back to the\nuser. Traditionally, I always thought this had the be of actual use, but a recent post by Rich actually suggested that even a\ngame mechanic may be enough. Indeed, websites like\nChemPedia.com and Blue Obelisk eXchange implement this by means of\npersonal karma, allowing people to compete in high score lists. Also, APIs to integrate with other tools are crucial, such as personal RSS\nfeeds to allow posting my new torrents to, for example, FriendFeed and Identica.
\n\nBut, the by far most important feature for BioTorrents will be to set up a reliable network of seeders. I already\nmentioned this on FriendFeed where I suggested university libraries\nto get involved. Ideally, every library will act as seeder in torrent networks, so that typically, you will download the data directly from your\nlocal library, instead of the other end of the world. For data sets of GB size or larger, this is going to have an important environmental impact,\non top of the much higher download speed.
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