Wikiprofessional
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
WikiProfessional (Wiki for Professionals) is an initiative that seeks to apply the "Wikipedia philosophy" to biomedical databases.
A test version of the project will be available soon (March 2007) at www.wikiprofessional.info.
It is cited in Nature's 2007-02-15 Vol445 issue, "Key biology databases go wiki" (subscription/PPV required). Also, the article "Meet the uber-wiki" in Ars Technica refers to Wiki for Professionals.
The current focus of the system is proteins. The system currently contains data from several sources[1]:
- 245,000 Proteins from UniProt/SwissProt
- 24,000 Gene Ontology terms from the GO Consortium
- 880,000 Concepts from UMLS/NLM
- 112,000,000 Unique sentences from Medline
- 5,000,000,000 Co-occuring concept pairs
- 2,000,000 factual relationships
The system is based on Mediawiki. When data is entered, the system semantically analyses and recognizes co-occurrences between different entities. This is then used to notify persons that have subscribed to these entities, enabling a rapid data interchange between collaborators.
The initiative is led by Barend Mons, a bioinformatican at the Erasmus Medical Centre and University Medical Centre. The system is set up by Knewco (B. Mons is an owner). Knewco will try to profit of WikiProfessionals by charging e.g. drug firms for "premium services", for example incorporation of a private version of the system with in-house data.
