Biomedical Engineering Reference
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thanks to the open source nature, could be undertaken by ourselves and
donated back to the community.
As for the general concept, the disease knowledge capture has many
benefi ts and aids organisations in capture, retaining and (re-)fi nding the
information surrounding key project decisions. However, a key question
is, will scientists invest the necessary time to enter their knowledge into
the system? Our belief is that scientists are willing to do this, when they
see tangible value from such approaches. This requires systems to be built
that combine highly user-orientated interfaces with intelligent semantics.
Although we are not there yet, software such as SMW provides a
tantalising glimpse into what could be in the future. Yet, as knowledge
management technologies develop there is still a need to look at
the cultural aspects of organisations and better mechanisms to promote
and reward these valuable activities. Otherwise, organisations like Pfi zer
will be doomed to a life of representing knowledge in slides and
documents, lacking the provenance required to trace critical statements
and decisions.
17.3 Conclusion
We have deployed Semantic MediaWiki for two contrasting use-cases.
Targetpedia is a system that combines large-scale data integration with
social networking while the Disease Knowledge Workbench seeks to
capture discourse and interpretation into a looser form. In both cases,
SMW allowed us to accelerate the delivery of prototypes to test these new
mechanisms for information management and converting tacit knowledge
into explicit, searchable facts. This is undeniably important - as research
moves into a new era where 'data is king', companies must identify new
and better ways of managing those data. Yet, developers may not always
know the requirements up front, and initial systems always require tuning
once they are released into real-world use. Software that enables
informatics to work with the science and not against it is crucial, and
something that SMW arguably demonstrates perfectly. Furthermore, as
described by Alquier (Chapter 16), SMW is geared to the semantic web,
undoubtedly a major component of future information and knowledge
management. SMW is not perfect, particularly in the area of GUI
interaction, and like any open source technology some of the extensions
were not well documented or had incompatibilities. However, it stands
out as a very impressive piece of software and one that has signifi cantly
enhanced our information environment.
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