blog

Michael Lappe is an F1000 Member in Structural Genomics, and runs an independent group at the Max Planck in Berlin. Michael has just evaluated a very interesting paper on something that has occurred to most of us who have anything at all to do with biological datasets–‘Sciencenet’–towards a global search and share engine for all scientific knowledge^{10.1093/bioinformatics/btr181}.

That’s quite an ambitious undertaking (all scientific knowledge), but very definitely something worth pursuing. The idea of searching multiple databases ties in with a couple of secret projects we’ve been kicking around here at F1000 over the last couple of years, so my ears pricked up when I saw the evaluation come through this morning. (Anybody else think ‘Sciencenet’ is an unfortunate choice of name?)

There is a prototype at https://sciencenet.kit.edu/. I’ve had a little play, and think I’m going to put the emphasis on prototype. I ran a search on a protein close to my heart and found the results not quite as useful as if I’d gone directly to some of the more familiar databases. Perhaps Sciencenet will improve with time–I certainly hope so–or maybe we should think about a filtering mechanism on top of this search engine (hey, now that sounds familiar).

That well-known Estonian protein...

But rather than listen to me wibble on about it, go and read Michael’s free evaluation, and have a play with it yourself. Let us know what you think.