Zzzoot

At a recent plenary I gave [ earlier post ] at the Colorado Association of Research Libraries Next Gen Library Interfaces conference, I went a little off-script and was educating (/haranguing) the mostly librarian audience about the present-and-near-future importance of the accessibility of full-text research articles to their researchers and scientists. By accessibility of full-text I didn't mean the ability of a human to access the PDF or HTML of an article via a web browser: I was referring to the machine- accessibility of the text contained in the article (and the metadata and the citation information). I was concerned because of the increasing number of discipline-specific tools that use full-text (& metadata & citations) to allow users (via text mining, semantic analysis, etc.) to navigate, analyze and discover new ideas and relationships, from the research literature. The general label for this kind of research is ' literature-based discovery ', where new ...

The NSF announced today announced it would be awarding $50M to the iPlant Collective , a " dynamic web portal for the Plant Science Cyberinfrastructure Collaborative Community " to address the ' grand challenges' in plant science. The effort will create a global centre bringing together (virtually and actually) computer scientists, information scientists and plant scientists to work on projects untenable until this project due to such issues as complexity, scale, discipline boundaries, lack of collaboration structures, etc. The centre "... will bring together and leverage the resources and information generated through the National Plant Genome Initiative , enabling more breadth and depth of research in every aspect of plant science " and will serve as a model for other disciplines on how collaborative cyberinfrastructure can be applied.

Wiki for Professionals : VERY ambitious & exciting While the name does not really inspire me ;-) this is an amazing initiative and the various quotes by researchers describing Barend Mons ' project as visionary are completely justified. He (they) are trying to pull together the Semantic Web with a variety of biological databases and PubMed in a suped-up semantically-enhanced Wiki environment that is meant to be used by -- and be useful to -- biological researchers.