[sc-announce] Why we need to figure out what we already know - Science Commons blog

Donna Wentworth dwentworth at creativecommons.org
Fri Jan 4 15:26:42 EST 2008


Why we need to figure out what we already know

January 4th, 2008<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/01/04/why-we-need-to-figure-out-what-we-already-know/>by
dwentworth

Over at Corante's *In the Pipeline <http://pipeline.corante.com/> *, organic
chemist Derek Lowe has a
post<http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/11/29/neat_wish_it_were_true.php>that
vividly demonstrates one of the unfortunate realities of the research
environment: researchers can spend years "discovering" what's already been
discovered. In a recent case that Lowe cites, a group of researchers somehow
managed to publish two papers documenting a chemical reaction that was
discovered no less than a century ago:

Professor Manfred Cristl of Wurzburg, who apparently knows his pyridinium
chemistry pretty well, recognized [the reaction] as an old way to make
further pyridinium salts…. He recounts how over the last couple of months he
exchanged awkward e-mails with the two sets of authors, pointing out that
they seem to have rediscovered a 100-year-old reaction, and have they really
looked at their spectral data closely, eh?

This kind of mistake is incredibly embarrassing; you can easily imagine a
chemistry professor using it as a cautionary tale to help students
understand the importance of a thorough literature search. But it also has
deeper implications. One of the most common myths about the Web is that it
makes mistakes like this impossible. If Google knows all, why not ask it to
tell us everything there is to know about pyridinium chemistry?

Of course, it doesn't work like that, for a number of reasons. One is that
Google uses text-based matching to find web pages, and its method for
determining whether a particular page is relevant relies in large part on
the number of people who have linked to it. This is a useful for finding
lots of things — especially consumer products. It doesn't work nearly as
well for scientific research.

At Science Commons, we want to enable scientists to use the Web to get
precise answers to complex research questions — not 388,000+ search results
that contain the word pyridinium. We hope to do much more than help
researchers avoid embarrassing mistakes. We want to empower them to build on
existing knowledge, so they can take the next steps toward discovery without
having to repeatedly double-back.

John Wilbanks, who leads Science Commons, has a personal
blog<http://network.nature.com/blogs/user/wilbanks>over on Nature
Network, where he's been sharing his ideas for realizing this
vision. He writes<http://network.nature.com/blogs/user/wilbanks/2007/11/27/seeding-the-social-web-for-science>:
"[We] have to date published our knowledge in formats designed for a
different world. One idea, one lab, one gene, one protein, one paper, one
database. [If] we can mark up the knowledge better, we can do a lot better
without a gee-whiz theoretical breakthrough, just by better using what we do
indeed already know."

If you'd like to learn about how Science Commons is "marking" knowledge,
check out our Neurocommons
project<http://sciencecommons.org/projects/data/>— an initiative aimed
at demonstrating how a Semantic
Web <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web> approach to making
information useful can help us figure out what we already know.

................
Donna Wentworth
Communications Specialist
Science Commons
http://sciencecommons.org
dwentworth at creativecommons.org <kaitlin at creativecommons.org>
................
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