Effectopedia – An Open Data Project for Collaborative Scientific Research, with the aim of reducing Animal Testing by Velichka Dimitrova, Coordinator of the Open Economics Working Group and Hristo Alajdov, Associate Professor at Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
From the post:
One of the key problems in natural science research is the lack of effective collaboration. A lot of research is conducted by scientists from different disciplines, yet cross-discipline collaboration is rare. Even within a discipline, research is often duplicated, which wastes resources and valuable scientific potential. Furthermore, without a common framework and context, research that involves animal testing often becomes phenomenological and little or no general knowledge can be gained from it. The peer reviewed publishing process is also not very effective in stimulating scientific collaboration, mainly due to the loss of an underlying machine readable structure for the data and the duration of the process itself.
If research results were more effectively shared and re-used by a wider scientific community – including scientists with different disciplinary backgrounds – many of these problems could be addressed. We could hope to see a more efficient use of resources, an accelerated rate of academic publications, and, ultimately, a reduction in animal testing.
Effectopedia is a project of the International QSAR Foundation. Effectopedia itself is an open knowledge aggregation and collaboration tool that provides a means of describing adverse outcome pathways (AOPs)1 in an encyclopedic manner. Effectopedia defines internal organizational space which helps scientist with different backgrounds to know exactly where their knowledge belongs and aids them in identifying both the larger context of their research and the individual experts who might be actively interested in it. Using automated notifications when researchers create causal linkage between parts of the pathways, they can simultaneously create a valuable contact with a fellow researcher interested in the same topic who might have a different background or perspective towards the subject. Effectopedia allows creation of live scientific documents which are instantly open for focused discussions and feedback whilst giving credit to the original authors and reviewers involved. The review process is never closed and if new evidence arises it can be presented immediately, allowing the information in Effectopedia to remain current, while keeping track of its complete evolution.
Sounds interesting but there is no link to the Effectopedia website. Followed links a bit and found: Effectopedia at SourceForge.
Apparently still in pre-alpha state.
I remember more than one workspace project so how do we decide whose identifications/terminology gets used?
Isn’t that the tough nut of collaboration? If scholars (given my background in biblical studies) decide to collaborate beyond their departments, they form projects, but that are less inclusive than all workers in a particular area. The end result being there are multiple projects with different identifications/terminologies. How do we bridge those gaps?
As you know, my suggestion is that everyone keeps their own identifications/terminologies.
Curious though if everyone does, keeps their own identifications/terminologies, if they will be able to read enough of another project’s content to understand that it is meaningful in their quest?
That is a topic map author deciding that two or more representatives represent the same subject may not carry over to users of the topic map having the same appreciation.