B - "Strategic Reading, Ontologies, and the Future of Scientific Publishing"

Since its first "unseccessful step" - the launch of the “Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials” in1992 - information gathering have become, in the past decade, more and more sophisticated. The turning point of such progress is clear when more than ten years later, technical, medical and scientific journals had nearly them all their online version. Nowadays, new softwares with a more structured, fast and detailed research of data on the web have become an essential tool and aid for researchers and scientific publishing. Scientific articles becomes not just a mere electronic representation of text: thanks to a “strategic reading” scientists can work simultaneously with many articles without the need of reading them individually (dramatically changing the reading practices among scientists). This is possible thanks to ontologies, which the author describe as “structured terminology for representing scientific data” ... “speaking a language that can also be understood by computers”.
Thanks to Ernesto Costabile

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