New on the Science Commons blog …

Pharmaceutical companies may soon be adopting Semantic Web standards and technology if they haven’t already, according to a recent piece in Chemical & Engineering News. The cover story, “The Semantic Web: Pharma researchers Adopt an Orphan Internet Standard”, looks at the desirability of such search technology and functionality in the pharma world, specifically highlighting our proof-of-concept project – the Neurocommons.

From the article:

“John Wilbanks, executive director of the Science Commons, a spin-off of Creative Commons that develops routes to legal sharing of copyrighted scientific documents and data, sees a critical mass of IT-savvy researchers enthusiastically pursuing projects using the semantic Web. He compares their efforts to pioneering work on the Internet itself.

‘Around 1995 or 1996, all the subterranean work exploded,’ Wilbanks says, ‘and most people discovered the Web. What is happening now on the semantic Web is similar to what was going on in the five years leading up to that explosion.’

Science Commons, in association with W3C, recently launched a demonstration project called Neurocommons to illustrate the benefits of the semantic Web in neurological disease research. […]

[…] [Wilbanks] says companies will eventually have to adapt in-house semantic Webs to a broader standard that expedites collaborative research between companies and institutions. Such a standard will most likely emerge as in-house projects “boil over” and merge. ‘There are enough databases and enough smart people involved,’ he says. ‘You can really see the momentum now.’

The article can be read in its entirety here.