What got me thinking all over again about the Semantic Web and how to find, navigate, recombine, and contribute to the flow of knowledge was a brief series of meetings with the folks at BioMedCentral. Of course, it helps that I am also a bio-geek.
BMC Bioinformatics had a special supplement on semantic e-science in biomedicine. The articles were very interesting, especially since seeing a problem solved in another discipline gives many pointers as to how to solve similar problems in your own discipline.
If you read the quote below, about infoglut, complexity, social networks, and information sharing, once sees similar activities in the social and living Web we all use.
But so much of the BMC Bioinformatics supplement is about librarian-like structuring of data. What’s more, there is an element of structures that authors need to understand and adhere to to make their publications and data more machine understandable.
Yet, what is the benefit to the author? Currently, scientific publications establish primacy, prestige, and are a tool to get grants. By going through the extra effort of adding semantics to their data, what then does the individual author gain?
The rise of tagging and folksonomies were not only about helping others, but arose out of tools that made things easier for the user. Can we change the mentality of the scientist to understand the other benefits of adding semantic info to their data and publications, benefits that are different from traditional science publishing?
How may we do this?
Link: BioMed Central | Full text | Introduction to semantic e-Science in biomedicine:
Advances in biotechnology and computing technology have made the information growth in biomedicine phenomenal. With the exponential growth in complexity and scope of modern biomedical research, it is becoming more and more urgent to support wide-scale and ad-hoc collaboration and exchanging ideas, information and knowledge across organizational, governance, socio-cultural, and disciplinary boundaries. Researchers working on one aspect of analysis may need to look for and explore results from other institutions, from other subfields within his or her discipline, or even from completely different biomedical disciplines.
