From Proteins to Fairytales: Directions in Semantic Publishing

There has been an ongoing discussion about how to improve the delivery of scientific content using online tools, especially by focusing on content reuse and social media. This column explores how semantic technologies and systems could also enhance the scientific communication process. The author discusses some ongoing initiatives in semantic publishing, which aims to improve how scientists communicate using semantic technologies. The column mentions different types of projects, including efforts focusing on entity enrichment and projects that involve triple markup of documents (subject-predicate-object expressions). However, such approaches are not enough. They help us find information, but they don't help us understand it. The author argues that we need to incorporate a better understanding of how language encodes meaning into our systems, so that we can develop a richer scientific knowledge representation.