Interactive WikiProteins Project Invites Researchers to Annotate Biological Concepts
Hoping to bring together “a million minds” to annotate proteins, a team of researchers has launched a large-scale, community-based project called WikiProteins that combines automated text, data, and concept mining, manual annotation, and a newly developed software component called the Knowlet. The project, which aims to annotate proteins and protein-related biomedical concepts such as diseases or organisms, will be powered by a platform technology designed by a group of scientists and a Rockville, Md.-based startup and will be made available free of charge in perpetuity for the scientific community and the public. Called WikiProfessional , the platform “in a technical sense powers the community-version that we have now put out there, but you could take exactly the same technology platform and install it locally at a pharmaceutical company for them to do drug-lead discovery,” said Albert Mons, a computational linguist and co-founder of the startup, Knewco. “Philosophically we wante...