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Elsevier have recently announced the two winners of their Grand Challenge competition for software tools to handle the ever-increasing amount of life sciences information online. Herman van Campenhout, CEO of Elsevier said: "I was impressed not only with the quality of the tools the finalists developed, but with the atmosphere of collaboration."
van Campenhout continues, "Though the teams were in competition with one another, they were very open with their ideas, and a real sense of community has developed around the Elsevier Grand Challenge. We feel, more than ever, that by listening to what researchers want, and by partnering with members of the community to co-develop tools to improve some scientific communication, we can create some very innovative solutions together."
The $35,000 winning team from EMBL, Heidelberg developed a tool called Reflect. On the Elsevier Challenge website they describe themselves: "Most of us interested in the life sciences regularly come across names of genes, proteins or small molecules that we would like to know more about. To make this process easier, our team at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory have developed a new, free service called Reflect that can be installed as a plug-in to Firefox or Internet Explorer.
"With just one mouse-click, Reflect can tag gene, protein, or small molecule names to any web page, usually within a few seconds, without affecting the page layout. Clicking on a tagged item opens a pop-up showing a concise summary of important features, such as sequence (full proteins) or 2D structure (for small molecules). The pop-up also allows navigation to commonly used source databases."
DERI, with the $15,000 second prize, say of their CORAAL tool: "Despite being a flourishing field, contemporary online scientific publishing properly exploits mostly raw publication data (rather meaningless bags of words) and shallow meta-data (authors, keywords, citations, etc.) The much-needed economical mass exploitation of the knowledge implicitly contained in publication texts is still mostly uncharted territory. The tool essentially extracts asserted publication meta-data together with the knowledge implicitly present in the respective text, integrates the emergent content and exposes it via a multiple-perspective search/browse interface. This way we allow for convenient diving into publications and bathing in the knowledge related to the particular texts at the same time."
Elsevier's Anita de Waard said, "The most amazing outcome of the challenge, I believe, is that it has actually helped produce some very good science. It seems clear that there is no single solution to solving the information infarct in biology. Apart from helping develop some wonderfully innovative thinking about improved ways to publish and access science, the Challenge has already led to several collaborations between participants."
More on Reflect at: http://reflect.ws
More on CORAAL at: http://smile.deri.ie |
