Pierre Lindenbaum has released SciFOAF, a java tool for creating FOAF files from PubMed citations. From the site: 'SciFOAF is an interface used to generate a FOAF file using NCBI Pubmed. The PubMed bibliographic database is a powerful source to discover collaboration networks as each paper submitted contains potential information about each author. An interface called SciFOAF (Scientific FOAF) was written to generate a FOAF file from the literature found in PubMed. It is initialized with a PubMed identifier (PMID) that is used as a seed to start browsing a collaboration network and the user is asked to select the authors of this paper that will appear in the FOAF file. Authors are stored in a 'stack' and the user interaction will be required until this stack is empty. For each person in the stack complementary information (such as e-mail, web site...) can be fulfilled and his latest publications are fetched from NCBI using the NCBI E-Utilities tool. Then, for each article the user is asked if the current person is unambiguously one of the authors and whether he knows any of the co-authors (which may not be necessarily the case when there is a large number of collaborators) and each of these new co-author is added on top of the stack. Laboratories addresses are extracted from the articles and the user can select among this list to affiliate the current author to one or more laboratory. The user can also link the current author with a person already depicted if they know each other but did not take part in a common publication. Author's interests are defined using the MESH terms of their papers. Once all information about the current author have been fulfilled he is removed from the stack and at the end, the user can save its FOAF file as a XML/RDF file. This process could have been generated automatically by a recursive program without human intervention if there was not ambiguity between authors names.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/05/2005 04:30:00 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.
