Zzzoot

As yet another newspaper "gets it" and launches an API (" Open Platform ") to its content (" Newspaper as a Platform: Guardian Launches API" - ReadWriteWeb), leveraging the creativity of the masses for the creation of mashups, mixins and just plain wonderful and wonky applications, I can only hope that the holders of significant scientific content, like scientific publishers and aggregators, will also move in this direction. Nature's OTMI seems a rather Web 1.0 inspired effort, and with limited usability at that (although Nature has stopped working on OTMI). Exposing research article contents (full text, metadata, citations, datasets, ontologies, etc) - even it be 6+ months old - to the world through a sensible (and maybe even shared/standard) API would create an explosion of mashups ranging from incredible researcher-oriented knowledge discovery tools to normal human being-oriented applications for finding things like as-yet-unreported possible da...

Royal Society of Chemistry Semantic Publishing Project Prospect is an exciting effort by the RSC where "... journal papers will be enhanced so that their data can be read, indexed and intelligently searched by machine, a first step towards the "semantic web" ." As someone working in the area of text retrieval and semantic web, this is a very exciting prospect. RSC's Project Prospect is reminiscent of Nature's Open Text Mining Interface (OTMI) effort -- in which I am also participating -- but in the case of Project Prospect, more semantic content will be exposed.