The Semantically Interlinked Scientific Communities project (from here on called SISC) is an ambitious project that uses Semantic Web standards (RDF, OWL, RDFa) to drastically improve how scientific data and knowledge is represented and communicated on the web. It builds on established ontologies and metadata standards and adapts them for the use in scientific practice.
Features:
* Structured, semantic representation of scientific discourse. With SISC it is possible to make statements about agreement, disagreement and other relations between scientific documents, research findings, database entries, and even between different portions of text.
* The barriers and distinctions between publications and databases are removed. RDF/OWL is embedded directly into the text -- not as a mere annotation of the text, but as a direct representation of biological reality.
* Fine-grained control of authorship information and copyright status of documents and database entries.
* Direct integration of most important biomedical ontologies (e.g. from the Open Biomedical Ontologies collection).
* SISC transforms popular web communication platforms like weblogs and bulletin boards into perfect tools for scientific discourse. The flow of information between different e-mails, blog entries and forum postings is captured through explicits semantic structures and connects seamlessly to scientific publications and database entries. All of this can be queried as a coherent Semantic Web.
* Bibliographic, personal and organizational information is expressed throug Semantic Web standards that ease personal information management.
Some basic (and very incomplete) example pages that demonstrate the use of SISC in research on Alzheimer's disease:
Publication 1
Publication 2 (motivated by publication 1)
Publication 3 (contains statements that conflict with publication 1)
Example of a scientific weblog containing RDF metadata generated with the SIOC plugin for Wordpress. The resulting RDF looks like this (automatucally produced with the SIOC browser).
SIOC Semantically Interlinked Open Communities |
“SIOC provides methods for interconnecting discussion methods such as blogs, forums and mailing lists to each other. It consists of the SIOC ontology, an open-standard machine readable format for expressing the information contained both explicitly and implicitly in internet discussion methods, of SIOC metadata producers for a number of popular blogging platforms and content management systems, and of storage and browsing / searching systems.” In SISC, SIOC is adapted for the representation of basic scientific discourse in scientific publications or on the web. |
FOAF |
FOAF is a popular Semantic Web ontology for the description of personal data, personal relationships and organisations. |
Dublin Core |
Dublin core is a widely accepted metadata standard for the description of resources (e.g. title, creator, copyright etc.) |
Creative Commons Ontology |
Creative Commons metadata is a widely used standard for the description of copyright information. In SISC it is used to make machine-readable statements about the copyright restrictions of scientific publications, images and datasets. |
Science Commons ontology |
The Science Commons and Neurocommons ontologies contain basic constructs for relations between biological entities, bioinformatics resources and for the representation of textmining results. The Neurocommons project is also conducting large-scaled textmining of biomedical literature to extract information and convert them into Semantic Web formats. http://sciencecommons.org/ http://neurocommons.org/ |
Open Biomedical Ontologies |
Large repository of biomedical ontologies (including the Gene Ontology). |
OBO Relation Ontology |
The Relation Ontology defines basic relationships between entities. It is the basis of many current biomedical ontologies. |
RDF/OWL data collection of the W3C HCLS Interest Group |
The Semantic Web in Health Care and Life Science Interest Group of the World Wide Web consortium is creating a large infrastructure of biomedical ontologies and tools. |
The current development version of the SISC ontology can be imported from http://purl.org/zen/sisc.owl