[Ross] King and Larissa Soldatova,...computer-science professor[s] at Aberystwyth, have designed a framework that could help computers understand and analyze scientific papers and make useful comparisons among them. The framework -- an ontology, as the researchers call it, named EXPO -- allows scientists to document the essential details of their experiments with keyword descriptions known as metadata. A software program designed by Mr. King and Ms. Soldatova can then "harvest" those metadata tags, using them to look for specific kinds of research and compare the researchers' results.
According to Mr. King and Ms. Soldatova, the metadata their program relies on describes "generic knowledge about scientific experimental design, methodology, and results representation" -- information about what hypothesis was formulated, how it was tested, and what results the experiment achieved. Mr. King and Ms. Soldatova made a point to keep the tagging data general because they want EXPO to pull together research from different sciences. Scholars in several disciplines -- like biology and genomics -- have worked to create their own ontologies, Mr. King says, "but they're doing that sort of individually in their own little silos....We tried to identify the key objects that are common to all experiments, whether they're biology, chemistry, or what have you," he says.
Computers that routinely read research reports might help keep scientists abreast of the work of scholars in other fields, and they could keep researchers from duplicating experiments conducted by their colleagues, Mr. King said. Of course, scientists must first be convinced to start using the EXPO framework -- which, for the time being, requires people who write research reports to input all of the required metadata themselves.
Comment. Just like text-mining software, article-reading and semantic-crunching software help OA by providing one more incentive for authors and publishers to make their work freely available on the open web for analysis and processing. I call this the software strategy for OA: build spectacular tools optimized for OA literature and add to the compelling incentives that already exist.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/09/2006 05:05:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
