Microsoft supporting scholarly communication lifecycle

At the ninth annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Microsoft announced the following services which were developed by partnering with Academia:

• Add-ins. The Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 enables metadata to be captured at the authoring stage to preserve document structure and semantic information throughout the publishing process, which is essential for enabling search, discovery and analysis in subsequent stages of the life cycle. The Creative Commons Add-in for Office 2007 allows authors to embed Creative Commons licenses directly into an Office document (Word, Excel or PowerPoint) by linking to the Creative Commons site via a Web service.

• The Microsoft e-Journal Service. This offering provides a hosted, full-service solution that facilitates easy self-publishing of online-only journals to facilitate the availability of conference proceedings and small and medium-sized journals.

• Research Output Repository Platform. This platform helps capture and leverage semantic relationships among academic objects — such as papers, lectures, presentations and video — to greatly facilitate access to these items in exciting new ways.

• The Research Information Centre. In close partnership with the British Library, this collaborative workspace will be hosted via Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and will allow researchers to collaborate throughout the entire research project workflow, from seeking research funding to searching and collecting information, as well as managing data, papers and other research objects throughout the research process. via Microsoft PressPass

"The Future of Science"

"Ideally, we’ll achieve a kind of extreme openness. This means: making many more types of content available than just scientific papers; allowing creative reuse and modification of existing work through more open licensing and community norms; making all information not just human readable but also machine readable; providing open APIs to enable the building of additional services on top of the scientific literature, and possibly even multiple layers of increasingly powerful services. Such extreme openness is the ultimate expression of the idea that others may build upon and extend the work of individual scientists in ways they themselves would never have conceived."[bolding is mine] Michael Nielsen

Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship

James Evans article hits some interesting points. Discussion on the article at friendfeed
and here

"Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled. But because they are used differently than print—scientists and scholars tend to search electronically and follow hyperlinks rather than browse or peruse—electronically available journals may portend an ironic change for science. Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005), I show that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles. The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship. Searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon."

We need semantics in scientific search

Scientific online publishers must develop expertise in semantic search in their technology teams and hire gurus in semantic web from academia or corporate world. That's one of the ways we will enhance the value of scientific content. Peter Mika's article describes why we need semantics in search. Peter is a researcher at Yahoo! Research

Here is some of the limitations of the current search platforms :

"Even though search is considered a functional technology, there are limits to a syntax-based approach. The following list shows some examples of these limitations.

• It is almost impossible to return search results that relate to the secondary sense of a term—especially if a dominant sense exists—for example, try searching for George Bush the beer brewer as compared to the President.
• The capabilities of computational advertising, which is largely also an IR problem (for example, retrieving matching ads from a fixed inventory), are clearly impacted because of the sparsity of advertisements.
• When no clear key exists, search engines are unable to perform queries on descriptions of objects. For example, try searching for the author of this article with the keywords ‘semantic web researcher working for yahoo.’
• Current search technology is unable to satisfy any complex queries requiring information integration such as analysis, prediction, scheduling, etc. An example of such integration-based tasks is opinion mining regarding products or services. While there have been some successes in opinion mining with pure sentiment analysis, it is often the case that users like to know what specific aspects of a product or service are being described in positive or negative terms and to have the search results appear aggregated and organized. Information integration is not possible without structured representations of content.
• Multimedia queries are also difficult to answer, as multimedia objects are typically described with only a few keywords (tagging) or sentences. This is typically too little text for the statistical methods of IR to be effective."

Interactive research platform for nano-community

"The nanoHUB is a rich, web-based resource for research, education and collaboration in nanotechnology. The nanoHUB hosts over 1100 resources which will help you learn about nanotechnology, including Online Presentations, Courses, Learning Modules, Podcasts, Animations, Teaching Materials, and more. Most importantly, the nanoHUB offers simulation tools which you can access from your web browser, so you can not only learn about but also simulate nanotechnology devices. The nanoHUB also provides collaboration environment via Workspaces, Online meetings and User groups."

via Deepak

RSS welcomes the new addition

Penny, Tamar and Ilan with our new baby boy who was born this morning at 9:33.


PS Amazing waste of time and archaic methods in" collecting information" in the health care industry

Creating meaningful learning environments

Another educational piece from Dr.Michael Wesch

via Stephen's Lighhouse

Open up to let scientists build applications

Bertalon Mesko post about Intermedi which was built by Thibault Helleputte using PubMed's open API.

Limitations of Pubmed: while being the most complete database of biomed publications, it has a major drawback: it is just publications-centered, not people centered. Even Hubmed, which is a re-engineering of Pubmed do not cover the people aspect. However the connection between people is an essential element for future collaboration, for knowing who works in the same area as who, etc.
Limitations of social networks: Every member of any social network knows it, the “friend” or “contact” status doesn’t always reflect a real-life situation. In my LinkedIn profile or in my Facebook profile, I have “friends” and “contacts” I never saw once in my life. A tool centered only on true relation between people could be welcome. via Personomics

Via Bertalon Mesko

Once you open up the scientists and researcher's creativity will bring new applications and solutions that will enhance the value of the content.....

It's official

Microsoft acquires PowerSet

Congratulations to PowerSet team...

Ex Libris is opening up

After Talis Platform we know have El Commons from Exlibris. via Panlibus

Ex Libris has translated its open-platform strategy into a program spanning three major areas of activity:

• Formalizing the process by which we design, implement, document, and publish our interfaces, to maintain consistency across all products and achieve comprehensiveness
• Increasing our emphasis on service-oriented architecture (SOA) principles in our future product designs, ensuring that our solutions will provide services as core building blocks for applications developed by us or by other parties
• Providing a platform that serves as a focal point for collaboration and as such, actively encourages and facilitates institutional and community initiatives to enhance our products or use them in ways we have not foreseen via Ex Libris