Semantic wikis as flexible database interfaces for biomedical applications | Scientific Reports

Abstract:  Several challenges prevent extracting knowledge from biomedical resources, including data heterogeneity and the difficulty to obtain and collaborate on data and annotations by medical doctors. Therefore, flexibility in their representation and interconnection is required; it is also essential to be able to interact easily with such data. In recent years, semantic tools have been developed: semantic wikis are collections of wiki pages that can be annotated with properties and so combine flexibility and expressiveness, two desirable aspects when modeling databases, especially in the dynamic biomedical domain. However, semantics and collaborative analysis of biomedical data is still an unsolved challenge. The aim of this work is to create a tool for easing the design and the setup of semantic databases and to give the possibility to enrich them with biostatistical applications. As a side effect, this will also make them reproducible, fostering their application by other research groups. A command-line software has been developed for creating all structures required by Semantic MediaWiki. Besides, a way to expose statistical analyses as R Shiny applications in the interface is provided, along with a facility to export Prolog predicates for reasoning with external tools. The developed software allowed to create a set of biomedical databases for the Neuroscience Department of the University of Padova in a more automated way. They can be extended with additional qualitative and statistical analyses of data, including for instance regressions, geographical distribution of diseases, and clustering. The software is released as open source-code and published under the GPL-3 license at https://github.com/mfalda/tsv2swm.

 

ResearchHub | Open Science Community

“ResearchHub’s mission is to accelerate the pace of scientific research. Our goal is to make a modern mobile and web application where people can collaborate on scientific research in a more efficient way, similar to what GitHub has done for software engineering.

Researchers are able to upload articles (preprint or postprint) in PDF form, summarize the findings of the work in an attached wiki, and discuss the findings in a completely open and accessible forum dedicated solely to the relevant article.

Within ResearchHub, papers are grouped in “Hubs” by area of research. Individual Hubs will essentially act as live journals within focused areas, within highly upvoted posts. (i.e the paper and its associated summary and discussion) moving to the top of each Hub.

To help bring this nascent community together and incentivize contribution to the platform, a newly created ERC20 token, ResearchCoin (RSC), has been created. Users receive RSC for uploading new content to the platform, as well as for summarizing and discussion research. Rewards for contributions are proportionate to how valuable the community perceives the actions to be – as measured by upvotes.”

 

PAPPI Public Wiki

“This wiki introduces a scoring system to evaluate publishers’ practices through the values of higher education, libraries, and learned societies. In this provisional scoring system, tentatively called Publishers Acting as Partners with Public Institutions of Higher Education & Land-grant Universities (PAPPIHELU, hereafter referred to as PAPPI), partners are publishers that focus on empowering researchers and scholars and also the institutions of higher education that support them. They see faculty, students, and institutions of higher education as essential partners, not customers, and emphasize the rights of content creators and disciplinary experts in the publishing process. PAPPI criteria evaluate how well a publisher’s practices are in synchronization with the common worldview and ethic of public and land-grant institutions of higher education and their libraries….

Credit is determined by a publisher’s score in the following main categories:

Public Access
Article Processing Charges
Copyright
Author Use
Educational Use
Business Model
Discoverability
Business Practices
Publishing Practices
Other Innovations …”

AcaWiki

“AcaWiki enables you to easily post summaries and literature reviews of peer-reviewed research. Many summaries on AcaWiki come up high on Google results. Please read our posting guidelines before proceeding. If you want to find summaries or literature reviews of peer-reviewed research, you can either browse summaries or search.”

Is it Safe to Use? – Guidelines for re-using images from Wiki sites — Naomi Korn Associates

“When searching for images for commercial use we often turn to Wiki sites as first port of call, but are all the images safe to use for commercial purposes?  Not everything posted in the Commons or Media sites or used on a Wiki page is in fact open access. Some images (particularly in WikiPedia), are there with an explanation that they are used on the site because they are all over the web and nothing else could be found or the licence holder could not be found.  Not everything that says it is “Public Domain” or “Creative Commons 0” actually is, depending on where you live.

It is easy to scroll down to the rights section below the image, and open the blue “More Info” button to check what kind of licence the image carries. There are various types of “CC” licence and the letters after CC tell you whether any restrictions apply. Importantly, you may not be allowed to change the photo (eg crop it or incorporate it into another work (ND) or you may not be allowed to use it commercially (NC). Explanations for the various letter codes can be found here https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.

The issues I will consider fall roughly into two categories: works of art and contemporary photographs of landscapes and architecture. …”

Is it Safe to Use? – Guidelines for re-using images from Wiki sites — Naomi Korn Associates

“When searching for images for commercial use we often turn to Wiki sites as first port of call, but are all the images safe to use for commercial purposes?  Not everything posted in the Commons or Media sites or used on a Wiki page is in fact open access. Some images (particularly in WikiPedia), are there with an explanation that they are used on the site because they are all over the web and nothing else could be found or the licence holder could not be found.  Not everything that says it is “Public Domain” or “Creative Commons 0” actually is, depending on where you live.

It is easy to scroll down to the rights section below the image, and open the blue “More Info” button to check what kind of licence the image carries. There are various types of “CC” licence and the letters after CC tell you whether any restrictions apply. Importantly, you may not be allowed to change the photo (eg crop it or incorporate it into another work (ND) or you may not be allowed to use it commercially (NC). Explanations for the various letter codes can be found here https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.

The issues I will consider fall roughly into two categories: works of art and contemporary photographs of landscapes and architecture. …”

LPForum20: Make the Open Access Directory Better for All: A Library Publishers Edit-a-thon | Library Publishing Coalition

“One of JeSLIB’s goals is to contribute to the Open Access and Library Publishing communities. There are many open access resources maintained by organizations around the world that are community driven. This means they depend on community input and crowd-sourcing.

The editors planned an interactive workshop, or edit-a-thon, to teach forum participants how to contribute to one of these community-driven platforms, The Open Access Directory (OAD). The OAD was co-founded by Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project. OAD is hosted by the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University, maintained by the OA community at large, and supervised by an independent editorial board….”

Wikipedia Editors Are Fighting The Coronavirus Both Online And Offline

““It is actually rare for me to become as involved in a set of articles as I have been in the coronavirus articles,” Dekimasu says. “However, there is a clear need for people to edit them, and I feel an ethical obligation to make them as helpful as possible, since they are getting hundreds of thousands of views every day.”

Those pages include the Wikipedia article for the virus itself, known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, the disease it causes, COVID-19, and the ongoing global pandemic the coronavirus has caused.

 

With so many eyes on Wikipedia’s coronavirus articles, providing accurate information is more important than ever. But it’s not blatantly inaccurate information that Dekimasu worries about, but the “subtle misinformation” that can appear….”

Open Access Directory – A resource for making sense of the open access landscape | Impact of Social Sciences

The Open Access Directory (OAD) is a wiki of factual lists on the subject of open access. Designed to make sense out of the chaos of different information about open access, in this post Nancy Pontika recounts why the OAD was created and outlines how it forms an important knowledge base for anyone seeking to learn about open access and its development.

Wikimedia in Universities

“You are being invited to participate in a survey titled ‘Wikimedia in Universities’. This survey is being done by Nick Sheppard from the University of Leeds.

We are also interested in how other organisations are using Wikimedia e.g. Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) The purpose of this survey is to gain insight into the use of the Wikimedia suite of tools in universities and GLAM organisations and will take you approximately 10 minutes to complete. You may choose not to participate. If you decide to participate you may withdraw at any time. If you decide not to participate or if you withdraw, you will not be penalised….”

WikiConference North America

“WikiConference North America is the annual conference of Wikimedia enthusiasts and volunteers from throughout North America, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. The 2019 conference will take place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 8-11. Join Wikipedia, -media, -data, and -cite enthusiasts for a long weekend of collaboration and discovery….”