...CWA is meant to provide a collaborative environment for academics from different disciplines, addressing the volume and the complexity of current scientific data and communication. This initiative may eventually be evolving in a public-private partnership supporting a global solution for the information overload currently being prohibitive to efficient innovation and knowledge discovery. The initial focus will be on highly complex biological data....
Rationale...
Data sources, particularly those outside the mainstream scientific literature and databases, are often not interoperable.
Stored information can most efficiently be turned into human, actionable knowledge when captured in a dynamic, non-redundant and unambiguous ‘ontological’ format, which we broadly refer to as the Concept Web, in which each node is a unique concept.
Multiple direct and indirect ‘associations’ between concepts need to be captured and represented between any pair of concepts in the Concept Web, with attributes and values attached, further to be called ‘edges’. A concept-edge-concept combination is a ‘triple’, the smallest building block of the Concept Web.
Information silos, including the rapidly developing biobanks, must be made interoperable in order to make optimal use of the knowledge they contain possible....
Science management, both in funding institutions and in academic environments, is in need of interoperable tools and data formats to be able to “reason” with all data available in order to have efficient resource allocation....
Specific activities
CWA offers solicited advice on Open Source and Open Access issues to its partners
CWA will use the state of the art (bio)informatics and semantic tools of its partners to reach its content harmonization aims and for creating the Concept Web
In case partners create unique ‘edges’ in the ‘triple index’ of the Concept Web by proprietary (bio)informatics technology, through human curation of informatics output or through laboratory confirmation of associations between concepts such as protein-protein connections, those partners retain the IP (mainly copyright) on the ‘triple collection’ they produce and maintain, but make them available in open access for non-commercial purposes. The Concept Web can be viewed as a large collection and the sum of all so far contributed edges between each pair of concepts....
Everyone will have full open access to the common triple index for non-commercial purposes....
The final aim is full interoperability of data sources and informatics tools, across natural languages to support the knowledge discovery, description and exchange process in science.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/26/2009 01:37:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
