Chemistry Central Blog

RSC unveils Project Prospect - a step towards the semantic web

Yesterday the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) announced its journal articles will be enhanced "so that their data
can be read, indexed and intelligently searched by machine."

Working with the Unilever Centre of Molecular Informatics and the Computing Laboratory at Cambridge University, the "prospect view" will allow readers to click on named compounds and scientific concepts in an electronic journal article to download structures, understand topics, or link through to electronic databases; compounds and ontology terms will be published as RSS feeds enabling automated discovery of relevant research.

Users will be able to highlight terms in the article that appears in the IUPAC Gold Book, terms from the three ontologies that may appear in the paper (OBO ontology terms (Open Biomedical Ontologies: a hierarchical classification of biomedical terms) such as the Gene Ontology (GO) and the related Sequence Ontology (SO)) and compounds which have been identified in the paper.

Here is an example view from the RSC site:



ref: http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/ProjectProspect/Examples.asp

It will be interesting to see how much this new functionality will be used, given the propensity of readers to click the "download PDF" option.

Posted by Bryan Vickery at 13:08    Comments (0)