Comments on: Care in Nomenclature Handling and Why Visual Inspection Will Remain

By: will

will — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:34:38 +0000

Whatever web authoring tools become/are available, not everyone will use them, or use them properly. The issue of inconsistent formats will never go away.

If you want to make chemical data searchable, just put in the work of reformatting and gathering the data properly (as happens on Wikipedia) and not hold any publisher/database responsible for this task…. it’s a lot of work.

and link back too –> dont republish (except factual/with permission) Its nicer

By: Antony Williams

Antony Williams — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:27:11 +0000

I DO believe it works very well and it certainly has eclipsed all competition.

I have my own opinions of why it happened and I think there are three drivers. In order or priority I think these are:

1) By far the most important – a rather small group of dedicated individuals who are willing to spend their time, their “off hours”, researching, writing, annotating and curating a growing dataset of information for consumption by Wikipedia users. This is done without any compensation, commonly without receiving kudos except within the team and driven by a passion to make a difference. These are special people…in a good way!
2) Media-Wiki is fairly easy to use and it is possible to make edits, updates and leave comments on records thereby ensuring the data is cleaned by oneself or by others. Peer-validation is important in this domain.
3) Wikipedia NOW has the name as a crowd-sourced encyclopedia, it has brand-recognition, traction and momentum and, I judge, there is more willingness to contribute now that it has persisted. It was not always true…ask the WP’edians about the “early days”.

I’ll prompt my WP:Chem colleagues for their input too…these are my opinions and I might be way off base…

By: Rich Apodaca

Rich Apodaca — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:11:43 +0000

Wikipedia is the ultimate data curation system, and it works far better than many think it should. In a few short years, this peculiar system has eclipsed all competition.

How did that happen?

Understanding the answer to this question may well be the key to building scalable, well-curated, and self-sustaining chemical databases in the future, whether they be created by aggregation or from scratch.

By: Antony Williams

Antony Williams — Mon, 05 May 2008 11:40:36 +0000

It is DEFINITELY not a solved problem. As I said above “Peter IS right. We DO Need Semantic Chemical Authoring Tools.” My comment is that even though they have not existed for almost all of the information that has been put online it is possible to reap a benefit from it when care, time and effort is put into it. This is what Peter’s team and we are up to (and likely you too!). There are many of us going through the struggles at present and dealing with the minutiae to put together high quality information. It takes so much time and effort because it demands visual inspection. Machine-readable formats would dramatically reduce this need. But, until they are in place visual inspection is going to need to be a part of the process. That’s why so much curation work is done at places like CAS and the other database builders. A lot of the curation is now done offshore because of the repetitive nature of the work and the price point per reviewed record.

By: Egon Willighagen

Egon Willighagen — Mon, 05 May 2008 10:30:18 +0000

Antony, you make it sound like it is a solved problem. But I do not have the feeling it is. Talking to publishers have learned me that putting semantics in the publishing process is much work. That would argument that most things are not solved yet, at all…