Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

Anyone who has ever built a website knows that maintaining it is a lot of work. There’s just making sure it hasn’t gone offline because the httpd daemon died. Constant monitoring for script kiddies and their SQL injections. Not to mention continually feeding it with fresh content, lest your audience become bored and desert. I’ve always thought it would be cool to build a site that could more or less look after itself. There’s a myriad of content management systems to choose from, most of which are somewhat hackable in whatever language they happen to be coded in. One of the more mature in this respect is Drupal - which is the engine behind Eureka! Science News . It’s a fully-automated science news portal, using a bunch of customised Drupal modules to aggregate, cluster, categorise and rank articles. First impressions are excellent. Coders will enjoy this post at Drupal explaining how it all works.

Already blogging on similar lines and the subject of Bring in data from the published literature in my earlier blog Smart tools to track, analyze and visualize research , here is another interesting experiment on similar lines: The experiment centres on Structured Digital Abstracts (SDA). SDA are extensions of the normal journal article abstracts that describe the relationship between two biological entities , mentioning the method used to study the relationship. Each sentence is preceded by one or more identifiers pointing to the corresponding database entries that contain the full details of the interaction e.g. protein A interacts with protein B, by method X . The aim of SDA is to assist data entry, text mining and literature searching by extracting the salient data from the article into simple sentences using a defined structure and controlled vocabularies. Gianni Cesareni, Editor of FEBS Letters explains: Many articles in biological journals describe relationships between ent...