Biomedical Engineering Reference
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proteins that were well established within a disease, but were not
themselves deemed 'druggable'. For instance, a transcription factor
might regulate pathways crucial to two distinct therapeutic areas, yet
as the teams are geographically distributed they may not realise a
common interest. Indeed, many respondents cited this intersection
between biological pathways and the 'idea portfolio' as an area in
need of much more information support.
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Embracing of 'wikis': we also learnt that a number of research units
(RUs) had already experimented with their own approaches to
managing day-to-day information on their targets and projects. Many
had independently arrived at the same solution and implemented a
wiki system. Users liked the simplicity, ease of collaboration and
familiarity (given their use of Wikipedia and Pfi zer's own internal wiki,
see Chapter 13 by Gardner and Revell). This highlighted that many
colleagues were comfortable with this type of approach and encouraged
us to develop a solution that was in tune with their thinking.
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Annotation: responses concerning annotation were mixed; there were
a range of opinions as to whether the time spent adding comments and
links to information pages was a valuable use of a scientists' time. We
also found that users viewed existing annotation software as too
cumbersome, often requiring many steps and logging in and out of
multiple systems. However, it was clear from the RU-wikis that there
was some appetite for community editing when placed in the right
context. It became very clear that if we wanted to encourage this
activity we needed to provide good tools that were a fi t with the
scientists' workfl ow and provided a tangible value to them.
17.1.2 Building the system
The Targetpedia was intended to be a 'fi rst stop' for target-orientated
information within the company. As such, it needed to present an
integrated view across a range of internal and external data sources. The
business analysis provided a clear steer towards a wiki-based system and
we reviewed many of the different platforms before deciding on the
Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) framework [7]. SMW (which is an extension
of the MediaWiki software behind Wikipedia) was chosen for the
following reasons:
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Agility: although our interviews suggested users would approve of the
wiki approach, we were keen to produce a prototype to test
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