Science Commons is working with the scientific community around the world to help increase the level of sharing and value that comes out of scientific research.
Their website describes three key goals ;
Making scientific research “re-useful” — We help people and organizations open and mark their research and data for reuse. Learn more.
Enabling “one-click” access to research materials — We help streamline the materials-transfer process so researchers can easily replicate, verify and extend research. Learn more.
Integrating fragmented information sources — We help researchers find, analyze and use data from disparate sources by marking and integrating the information with a common, computer-readable language. Learn more.
To further that goal, Microsoft has this week announced a project to build an add-in for Word 2007 that will provide functionality allowing scientists to embed the ontologies being defined on Neurocommons directly into documents produced using Microsoft Office.
From our press release;
The nuggets of information necessary for science to progress are often hard to find, submerged deep within the Web, or within databases that can’t be easily accessed or integrated. As a result, many scientists today work in relative isolation, follow blind alleys and unnecessarily duplicate existing research.
Addressing this critical challenge for researchers, Microsoft Corp. and Creative Commons announced today, before an industry panel at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech 2009, http://en.oreilly.com/et2009), the release of the Ontology Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 that will enable authors to easily add scientific hyperlinks as semantic annotations, drawn from ontologies, to their documents and research papers. Ontologies are shared vocabularies created and maintained by different academic domains to model their fields of study.
As with an increasing number of our projects these days the source code for the add-in is available on Codeplex for anybody who wants to make use of it;
Microsoft is making the source code for both the Ontology Add-in for Office Word 2007 and the Creative Commons Add-in for Office Word 2007 tool available under the Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) on CodePlex, Microsoft’s Web site for hosting open source projects, at http://ucsdbiolit.codeplex.com and http://ccaddin2007.codeplex.com respectively.
A little more on Neurocommons from their home page;
The NeuroCommons project seeks to make all scientific research materials – research articles, annotations, data, physical materials – as available and as useable as they can be. We do this by both fostering practices that render information in a form that promotes uniform access by computational agents – sometimes called “interoperability”. We want knowledge sources to combine meaningfully, enabling semantically precise queries that span multiple information sources.
Our work covers general data and knowledge sources used in computational biology as well as sources specific to neuroscience and neuromedicine. The practices that we develop and promote are designed to play well on the Semantic Web. We view our technical work not as creating a new service or content library, although we do both, but rather as helping to promote the growth of semantically linked scientific information.