Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the earlier established Wiki predecessors, Omegawiki [20] and WikiProfessional
[1]. It is a Web-based system containing the biomedical terminology of the
Unifi ed Medical Language System (UMLS, levels 0 and 1) mapped where
appropriate to the protein terminology from SwissProt. In the near future, the
ConceptWiki repository will be expanded to incorporate the chemical terminol-
ogy from ChemSpider [4] for biologically relevant chemical molecules. Each
concept in ConceptWiki is annotated with one or more semantic types and basic
information like a defi nition. Users can view and edit information through a
uniform interface. The information in the system is stored and edited in a highly
structured way, as triples (e.g.,
). The
WikiData backend has been designed to support the storage of concepts in a
very generic form, thereby trying to avoid as much as possible the exclusion of
potential valuable information sources. This compatibility with our other infor-
mation storage systems enables higher level applications to easily query, sum-
marize, and mine the knowledge. In line with recommendations from the CWA,
identifi ers in WikiData are completely opaque; they have no inherent structure
and no information can be derived from them. An opaque identifi er is a robust
identifi er as there will never be a need to change the identifi er when under-
lying information changes. WikiData uses universally unique identifi ers
(UUIDs) [21]. Additionally, WikiData keeps a complete history containing
every change made to the concepts. Changes can be analyzed via the history
page of each concept or the global chronological transaction log. Transactions
can be rolled back partially or completely. Using the ConceptWiki interface
scientists with no background in programming can directly map, merge, or inte-
grate individual concepts. ConceptWiki supports the distinction between
“ authority ” and “ community ” data [1] and permits general editing only on the
community branch of the data. This distinction is the highly innovative aspect
that convinces authorities that it is prudent to donate and integrate their data
into the system. Additionally, the comparison between the authority branches
and the community branches allows personal value judgments of displayed data.
ConceptWiki has an API for a thesauri extractor, an application for freely
downloading terminology systems for specifi c purposes or domains. The down-
loaded thesauri can be used to identify concept-denoting tokens in text and
databases so that individual indexers can be linked to the concepts to create
a linked open-data system [22]. ConceptWiki is in the public domain, indicated
by the Creative Commons so-called CC Zero Waiver
<
concept A
>
<
has synonym
>
<
term B
>
SC Norms, indicating
that copyrights are waived but that adherence to scientifi c community norms
regarding attribution and citation is expected. In this way, the community can
be regarded to “own” ConceptWiki and the UUID concept reference identi-
fi ers in it.
+
26.5
AUTHORSHIP OF SCIENTIFIC ASSERTIONS
Citability and credit to authors are of prime importance to the way the scien-
tifi c publishing system works. In a scientifi c context, publications are only
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