WikiFactMine: Scientific Knowledge for Everyone

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Dr. Peter Murray-Rust (Unilever Centre, Dept. Of Chemistry, University of Cambridge)
• Thursday 05 October 2017, 13:10-14:00
• The Richard King Room, Darwin College.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Lorena Escudero.

Peter Murray-Rust, ContentMine [1] and University of Cambridge

Public funding of science and medicine generates 1 trillion dollars of public knowledge per year but most of this is inaccessible to most people. Working with the Wikimedia Foundation we have developed tools for collecting over 6 million of the world’s open scientific articles and extracting the facts from them into WikiFactMine (WFM) [2] . We use Wikidata [3] which, with over 40 million “items” from Wikipedia or world authorities, is based on modern Open Web technology. WFM reads every new Open scientific article (starting with biomedicine) and indexes the terms against WikiFactMine. It thus becomes a “knowledge prosthetic” or “amanuensis” so that everyone can immediately find the accumulated knowledge in Wikimedia resources.

We believe that with WikiFactMine the scientific literature becomes accessible to a wide range of people and machines. Data in articles can be automatically indexed on fulltext and diagrammatic content creating the base for a new generation of scientific search engines. We have created a wide range of “dictionaries” from Wikidata, allowing multidisciplinary search of articles (e.g. chemistry, diseases, drugs…) . WikiFactMine can expand “find all chemicals produced by conifers” to 500 phytochemicals and 2000 conifers and search for all of them. “What viral diseases have been reported in West Africa” might inform public health policies in a new manner.

The talk will cover the technology (which anyone can use; ContentMine already has a 15-year old contributing) and the politics of academic publication where revenue is often generated by artificial scarcity. Can we find a better way? Everyone can participate in WikiFactMine.

I thank Charles Matthews and Tom Arrow who created WikiFactMine.

[1] http://contentmine.org [2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiFactMine [3] https://www.wikidata.org

This talk is part of the Darwin College Science Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• AUB_Cambridge Seminars
• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Centre for Health Leadership and Enterprise
• Chris Davis' list
• Darwin College Research Talks
• Darwin College Science Seminars
• Darwin Lectures and Seminars
• Guy Emerson's list
• Interested Talks
• Neurons, Fake News, DNA and your iPhone: The Mathematics of Information
• The Richard King Room, Darwin College
• custom

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.