06 February 2006

WIKI & gene annotation

In a recent issue of Nature, Dr Kai Wang from Washington University suggested to use a WIKI as a way to annotate genes, proteins, etc... I agree, that would be really useful to share evreybody's knowledge about a specific domain in a wiki. But then, as a bioinformatician, I've got the feeling that it would than be a real problem to extract all this information for knowledge discovery. There are already many tools (see Jensen & al. for a recent review) trying to parse and analyse the abstracts of pubmed and I don't think it would be a good thing to make the same mistakes: publishers sould provide a RDF/semantic web version of the abstracts in order to be fully interpretable by computers.

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