Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Microsoft is making it easier for scientists to link their documents to the Web in a meaningful way.

The software giant last week made an open source contribution to the Science Commons, described as a division of Creative Commons that is incubating the adoption of semantic scientific publishing through creation of a database of ontologies and development of supporting technical standards and code. It announced with Creative Commons at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Jose, Calif., that it is releasing the Ontology Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007, the “technology bridge” that will enable authors to easily add scientific hyperlinks as semantic annotations, drawn from those ontologies, to their documents and research papers.

The vendor is making the source code for the Ontology Add-in for Office Word 2007 available under the Open Source Initiative-approved Microsoft Public License on CodePlex.

“The Web is broken for scientific researchers — full of hyperlinks of scholarly articles, but it is nearly impossible for us to find what we need,” said John Wilbanks, vice president for Science at Creative Commons, in a statement announcing the development. “The semantic Web tool will help bridge the gap between basic research and meaningful discovery, unlocking the value of research so more people can benefit from the work scientists are doing.”

The problem in the scientific community is that, too often, research data is hard to find, buried deep in the web, or isolated in databases that can’t be easily accessed or integrated. With the add-in, semantic information is added as XML mark-up to manuscripts using ontologies and controlled vocabularies (from the National Center for Biomedical Ontology) and identifiers from major biological databases, so manuscript content is integrated with existing public data repositories, according to a description of the project on CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source project hosting website. The site notes that the project resulted from collaboration between Microsoft External Research and Dr. Phil Bourne and Dr. Lynn Fink, at the University of California San Diego. As background for why the scientific community needs this, it notes that:

“Cyberinfrastructure is integral to all aspects of conducting experimental research and distributing those results. However, it has yet to make a similar impact on the way we communicate that information. Peer-reviewed publications have long been the currency of scientific research as they are the fundamental unit through which scientists communicate with and evaluate each other.

“However, in striking contrast to the data, publications have yet to benefit from the opportunities offered by cyberinfrastructure. While the means of distributing publications has vastly improved, publishers have done little else to capitalize on the electronic medium. In particular, semantic information describing the content of these publications is sorely lacking, as is the integration of this information with data in public repositories.”

The development of open source tools to facilitate the semantic mark-up of new manuscripts and the submission of those manuscripts will, it hopes, address this problem and accelerate scientific discovery processes. Some bloggers have raised interesting questions, such as whether this work with Creative Commons will help to open up the Microsoft desktop productivity environment to the Open Web.

Others are exploring additional ways of using semantic technology to tackle problems that today impede research and hamper collaboration that should be harnessed to boost scientific exploration and discovery. Check out, for example, the work being done by Dr. Rahul Ramachandran and Sunil Movva at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who have developed Noesis, a new semantic web search engine aimed at helping scientists who study the environment be more precise and efficient at searching for the scientific data they need.

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