[Pdx-pm] wiki note
Thomas J Keller
kellert at ohsu.edu
Wed Apr 18 11:16:58 PDT 2007
FYI, from the science journal "Nature":
Nature 446, 856 (19 April 2007) | doi:10.1038/446856a; Published
online 18 April 2007
Other riffs on cooperation are already showing how well a wiki could
work
John D. Osborne1, Simon Lin2 & Warren A. Kibbe3
University of Alabama at Birmingham, 845 19th Street South, Bevill
Building, Room 273C, Birmingham, Alabama 35294, USA
Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center, Northwestern University,
676 North St Clair, Suite 1200, Chicago, Illinois 60611, USA
Center for Genetic Medicine, Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer
Center and Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, 676
North St Clair, Suite 1200, Chicago, Illinois 60611, USA
Sir:
Barend Mons's Wiki for Professionals at http://
www.wikiprofessional.info is among the first open collaborative
databases to use the wiki format in biology, as your News story "Key
biology databases go wiki" (Nature 445, 691; 2007) points out.
However, other, non-wiki resources have already shown the feasibility
of cooperative, online database construction. One such success story
is GeneRIF (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/GeneRIF), which is
like a miniature wiki where the author is restricted to a single
short sentence. Currently, GeneRIF contains close to 200,000 entries,
and each is attached to a particular gene at the Entrez database of
the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
Being interested in gene–disease relationships, we assessed the
coverage and specificity of GeneRIF and compared them to OMIM (Online
Mendelian Inheritance in Man), a traditional source of gene-disease
information. We found that GeneRIF already covers more than twice the
number of diseases per gene and includes many more newly discovered
mappings (http://www.basic.northwestern.edu/publications/generifdo).
This seems to us to answer the scepticism that has been expressed
about the expected community involvement in wiki collaborations.
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