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Tell us what we should develop next on Nature Network
Corie Lok
Wednesday, 14 February 2007 20:06 UTC
What new features do you want us to create for you on Nature Network? Post any ideas here. This is meant to be your site!
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Deepak,
it could really start of with a simple wiki. Organic chemists like Jean-Claude Bradly have been doing this for a while now.
See his Nature Precedings submission:
Bradley, Jean-Claude. Open Notebook Science Using Blogs and Wikis. Available from Nature Precedings <http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/npre.2007.39.1> (2007)(copy/pasting the ‘how to cite this document’ :)
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Egon/Deepak,
It would be interesting to incorporate an elctronic notebook on NN to see what is possible. Certainly I would be curious to see how our own notebook can map onto a different structure.I do appreciate Egon’s desire to see some semantic representation of information but it is a difficult task. The requirements vary between scientific fields. For example, chemical transformations and NMR data is typical for organic chemistry but would be meaningless for neuroscience.
Because of this variability, I still think that a general-purpose wiki makes the best electronic notebook. That should be simple for NN to do immediately.
From there we can think about creating a structure that uses some information from the wiki notebook pages to generate semantically rich information sources.
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Jean-Claude, I understand your concern, and agree that formal RDF (or OWL, or …) is currently not achievable. However, simpler ways to add semantics exist too, like microformats and RDFa. These are really easy to implement in HTML, including nowadays Wiki systems.
Regarding the domain knowledge, yes, that is specific indeed; a chemists is likely not interested in neuroscience domain semantics for his notebook, and vice versa. But that does not matter: these concepts are marked up in dictionaries/ontologies/thesauri, which might show overlap, but might be rather orthogonal too. The good thing is that the user does not need to worry about that, and shop only for those terms and ontologies suitable for his field of expertise.
RDFa is rather interesting here, as it is very close to true RDF in that it uses formal triples, but still allows simple markup (see http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/2007/06/chemical-rdfa-with-operator-in-firefox.html). This is all very new, but very exciting too, as we now have the tools to rework the way we communicate our scientific knowledge. Adding these semantics closes the gap between expert and artificial intelligence, and thinking about the social problems we face (AIDS, malaria, war, …) we should make our sciences work as efficient as possible, so that we can address as much of these problems as soon as possible. Every attempt to speed up scientific communication and dissemination should be high priority.
Publishers like RSC are slowly picking up these things, but we should keep them on edge here.
I am not worried about forcing authors to do things they don’t like (such as, organic chemists hack raw HTML), as they have to fulfill many other requirements too: put the biblio section in this format, no wait, other journal, make it that format, the experimental section should look like this and that, oh, and don’t forget to supply the images as bitmap, because our layout system cannot handle vector graphics. I would say that requiring semantics is somewhat more important!
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Hi everyone, I’m going to lock this topic, since it’s getting really long with all these replies. It’ll be easier for us to sort through people’s responses if you could all please post your new feature request as a new topic in this forum. Of course, if you’d like to post a response to someone else’s post, please do so. Thanks.
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Small addition from a short-term user. Is there some way people who add the same papers could be put in contact? Hopefully people would find each other anyway, but I collaborate fairly widely so some of the connections are tenuous, but worth reinforcing.
Really like the add via DOI tool, but doesn’t seem to work for ACS journals -
Please ignore my comment above about posting new suggestions as new topics. If you have an idea for a new feature, post it as a reply to this thread. For some reason, only moderators of this forum can start a new discussion topic. We’re looking into that.
Matthew, great idea about connecting people who have uploaded the same publication. We’re looking into that as well.
As for that DOI bug, I just emailed you about it. We’ll get that dealt with.
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Martin Dove had some excellent suggestions at the beginning of this thread. I would second him on his ideas.
A wiki is a must. Something many researchers have already been using for collaboration, although it will need some security to insure users feel safe posting. We’ve also used Google groups in a similar fashion for collaborating on proposals.
As also said, RSS everywhere. This would allow various means of notifications when collaborating. Some like email, some phone messages, some feed pages, etc.
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I think that having a possibility to include Polls in Groups would be very interesting and useful to a wide variety of users.
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Oh Yes, polls would be great, I agree.
I am not sure whether this has been mentioned before (indeed this thread has become humongous and I confess I have not screened all existing messages prior to posting this one), but I think that the ability to contact multiple contacts at once, via text-messaging, would be a bonus.Corie, how long is the wish-list by now?
Massimo -
Cheers Massimo. Our wishlist now runs into hundreds of items, but we’ll get there!
Polls are something we’re interested in building. We may leave it until the new blogging software is in place, however.
The ability to contact multiple people in one go is also a possibility. However, such systems can be dangerously attractive to spammers, so we have to be careful.
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