Calling on a million minds for community annotation in WikiProteins

Barend Mons¹^,2^,3^,4 , Michael Ashburner⁵ , Christine Chichester²^,3^,6 , Erik van Mulligen¹^,3 , Marc Weeber³ , Johan den Dunnen² , Gert-Jan van Ommen² , Mark Musen⁷ , Matthew Cockerill⁸ , Henning Hermjakob⁹ , Albert Mons³ , Abel Packer¹⁰ , Roberto Pacheco¹¹ , Suzanna Lewis⁵ , Alfred Berkeley³ , William Melton³ , Nickolas Barris³ , Jimmy Wales¹² , Gerard Meijssen⁴ , Erik Moeller⁴^,12 , Peter Jan Roes³ , Katy Borner¹³ and Amos Bairoch⁶

¹Erasmus Medical Centre, Department of Medical Informatics, Dr. Molewaterplein 40/50, NL-3015 GE Rotterdam, the Netherlands

²Department of Human Genetics, Centre for Medical Systems Biology, Leiden University Medical Centre, 2300 RC Leiden NL, Einthovenweg 20, 2333 ZC Leiden, the Netherlands

³Knewco Inc., Fallsgrove Drive, Rockville, MD 20850, USA

⁴Open Progress Foundation, Olstgracht, 1315 BH AlmereAlmere, the Netherlands

⁵The GO consortium, EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, and Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, Hinxton, CB10 1SD, United Kingdom; and Berkeley Bioinformatics Open-source Projects, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

⁶Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Swiss-Prot Group and Department of Structural Biology and Bioinformatics, University of Geneva, CMU - Rue Michel-Servet, 1211 Genève 4, Switzerland

⁷Stanford Medical Informatics, NCBO, Campus Drive, Stanford, CA 94305-5479, USA

⁸BioMed Central, Cleveland Street, London W1T 4LB, UK

⁹EMBL - European Bioinformatics Institute, IntAct database, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK

¹⁰SciELO, BIREME/PAHO/WHO, Rua Botucatu, 862, Vila Clementino 04023-901, São Paulo SP, Brazil

¹¹Istituto Stela, Rua Prof. Ayrton Roberto de Oliveira, 32, 7° andar Itacorubi, Florianópolis-SC, 88034-050, Brazil

¹²The WikiMedia Foundation, San Francisco, CA 94107-8350, USA

¹³Indiana University, S. Indiana Ave, Bloomington, IN 47405-7000, USA

author email corresponding author email

Genome Biology 2008, 9:R89doi:10.1186/gb-2008-9-5-r89


Published:	28 May 2008

Abstract

WikiProteins enables community annotation in a Wiki-based system. Extracts of major data sources have been fused into an editable environment that links out to the original sources. Data from community edits create automatic copies of the original data. Semantic technology captures concepts co-occurring in one sentence and thus potential factual statements. In addition, indirect associations between concepts have been calculated. We call on a 'million minds' to annotate a 'million concepts' and to collect facts from the literature with the reward of collaborative knowledge discovery. The system is available for beta testing at http://www.wikiprofessional.org webcite.