COLLABORATION AND THE SEMANTIC WEB - Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research - page 455

However, technical aspects are only one part of the challenge. Additionally,
it is necessary to build a community of people with a common purpose who
are extraordinarily enthusiastic about the collaborative offer. This community
will invest the necessary energy in pursuit of creating something unique. They
submit original ideas and content as well as remix each others' material to
produce solutions that will earn them respect, status, acceptance, reputation,
as well as rewards in the form of microcitations. In other words, they are com-
peting to get the credit for the best result. At another level, there is the larger
crowd that is participating on a much lower level of activity and involvement.
They tag, recommend, rate, vote, send e-mail links to colleagues, and some-
times make an occasional annotation. This interaction is therefore quite
shallow compared to the passionate annotators. There is however a great
wisdom to be gathered from all of this grassroots activity; their carefully elic-
ited input helps organize the solutions and understand their worth. Thus, they
introduce value to the community knowledge as they confi rm the relevance
and importance of the best material produced.
An awareness of the challenges does not mean that the previously outlined
pitfalls are automatically mitigated. Using Semantic Web technologies brings
us one step forward from the early developments of the “million minds”
approach [1]. A few of the major bottlenecks can now conceivably be solved:
the interoperability issue (related to “too many wikis”) with the adaptation of
Semantic Web and its standards and the “busy scientist syndrome” with
microcitation credit and ease of use of mobile technologies.

26.3 SEMANTIC WEB APPROACH

The Semantic Web can benefi t all producers and consumers of information by
providing improved mechanisms for organizing information on a global scale.
Based on the rapidly expanding role of Web-based resources, the Semantic
Web technologies offer critical support to the life sciences by (1) unique identi-
fi ers that are supported by the Semantic Web uniform resource identifi ers
(URIs); (2) coordination and management of terminologies and ontologies;
(3) model database conversions of life sciences data; (4) account and channel
access for scientists to store and share annotations based on the Semantic Web;
(5) tools and viewers conversant in the resource description framework (RDF);
and (6) inference and reasoning to produce theories, hypotheses, and models.
The key to harmonizing the diverse life scientifi c information via the
Semantic Web is based on a data structure called concept triples or assertions,
which when coupled to their provenance data are called nanopublications [6,
7]. Each concept triple represents the scientifi c assertion of a fact, an observa-
tion, or an inference. For example, < lovastatin > < inhibits > < 3 - hydroxy - 3 -

methylglutaryl - coenzyme A reductase ( Homo sapiens ) is a triple that can be

encoded using RDF. The RDF represents data as a set of directed graphs;
URIs are assembled into triples composed of a subject URI, a predicate URI,
and an object URI. The predicates of RDF triples are similar to hyperlinks;

>