John Wilbanks, Vice President of Science Commons, will be at Caltech to talk about the Neurocommons, an open source knowledge management platform for researchers in neuroscience. The first phase of the project attempts to organize neuroscience knowledge by text mining biomedical abstracts. The project demonstrates the benefit of making research text and data openly available. The Neurocommons is just one small part of the Science Commons, an not for profit organization which works from the research level to the policy level in order to improve access to scientific research on the web. The full announcement is below.

May 5, 2008 at 4:00 p.m.
BBB 24

Seminar co-sponsored by CNS and Caltech Library
Services

"The Neurocommons: Open Source Knowledge Management for Neuroscience" by
John Wilbanks, Vice President, Science Commons

The power of the Web makes it possible to share, use, and develop new
tools that leverage existing knowledge to greater productivity. The
Neurocommons project of the Science Commons http://sciencecommons.org/
grew out of the realization that while the Web provides significant
opportunity to enhance the use of research results there are also
particular needs different from the cultural web that have to be met.
Wilbanks will bring us up to date on the current status of data
integration, text mining, and analytical tools being developed within
the Neurocommons as a proof of concept of how Web technologies and
renewed public domain sharing can improve uptake of new information in
all applicable spheres of human endeavor.
http://sciencecommons.org/projects/data/nc_technical_overview

John Wilbanks comes to Creative Commons from a Fellowship at the World
Wide Web Consortium in Semantic Web for Life Sciences. Previously, he
founded and led to acquisition Incellico, a bioinformatics company that
built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical research &
development. Before founding Incellico, John was the first Assistant
Director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law
School. His first technology work was at fonix, where he researched
human-computer interface and pattern recognition. He also worked in US
politics as a legislative aide to U.S. Representative Fortney (Pete)
Stark and a grassroots coordinator and fundraiser for the American
Physical Therapy Association. John holds a Bachelor of Arts in
Philosophy from Tulane University and studied modern letters at the
Universite de Paris IV (La Sorbonne). He is a research affiliate at the
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and can be
found in the project MAC groupspace. He serves on the Advisory Board of
the U.S. National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central and the
International Advisory Board of the Prix Ars Electronica's Digital
Communities awards.