Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
PDF viewers, Utopia Documents forms two-way links between the
traditional human-readable PDF and any available semantic models
produced by publishers or the community, and public or in-house data
sources. The act of reading an article triggers heuristics that attempt to
automatically identify features within the PDF, which can then be
semantically annotated, and these annotations published to augment the
original article.
The software 'reads' a PDF much like a human does, recognizing
document content and features (title, authors, key words, sections,
fi gures, etc.) by their typographical layout, and ignoring less-important
artifacts and non-document content (such as watermarks and additional
information in the header or margins). Having gleaned this information
from the PDF, Utopia Documents is then able to automatically link
citations and references to online repositories.
As well as creating inbound and outbound links, Utopia Documents
incorporates a range of interactive features and visualizations that
effectively bring static PDF fi les to life. For example, the software can
turn tables of data into live spreadsheets (Figure 15.1); it can generate
charts - already linked to the source data - on the fl y; it can turn objects
and images (e.g. protein sequences and 3D structures) into live, interactive
views; and it can dynamically include data- and text-mining results
through customization with appropriate 'plug-ins'. It also allows readers
to add comments to articles, which can then be shared (and commented
on) with other users instantaneously, without the need to redistribute the
PDF fi le itself. The system currently links to several major life science and
bioinformatics databases, as well as to more general online resources,
such as Wikipedia. By means of its plug-in architecture, Utopia Documents
can be integrated with any web service-accessible resource, making it
easily customizable and extensible. Although it is possible for journal
publishers to enhance PDFs with content that Utopia can recognize
(noted below), it is important to state that the majority of Utopia's
features work on all modern scientifi c PDFs, and are not limited to only
a few specialized documents.
15.1 Utopia Documents in industry
In a commercial context, Utopia Documents aims to provide a new
way to enable 'joined-up thinking' within institutions, reducing the
cost of relating knowledge from within scientifi c articles to existing
Search WWH ::
Custom Search