Community intelligence in knowledge curation: an application to managing scientific nomenclature

PLoS One. 2013;8(2):e56961. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0056961. Epub 2013 Feb 25.

Abstract

Harnessing community intelligence in knowledge curation bears significant promise in dealing with communication and education in the flood of scientific knowledge. As knowledge is accumulated at ever-faster rates, scientific nomenclature, a particular kind of knowledge, is concurrently generated in all kinds of fields. Since nomenclature is a system of terms used to name things in a particular discipline, accurate translation of scientific nomenclature in different languages is of critical importance, not only for communications and collaborations with English-speaking people, but also for knowledge dissemination among people in the non-English-speaking world, particularly young students and researchers. However, it lacks of accuracy and standardization when translating scientific nomenclature from English to other languages, especially for those languages that do not belong to the same language family as English. To address this issue, here we propose for the first time the application of community intelligence in scientific nomenclature management, namely, harnessing collective intelligence for translation of scientific nomenclature from English to other languages. As community intelligence applied to knowledge curation is primarily aided by wiki and Chinese is the native language for about one-fifth of the world's population, we put the proposed application into practice, by developing a wiki-based English-to-Chinese Scientific Nomenclature Dictionary (ESND; http://esnd.big.ac.cn). ESND is a wiki-based, publicly editable and open-content platform, exploiting the whole power of the scientific community in collectively and collaboratively managing scientific nomenclature. Based on community curation, ESND is capable of achieving accurate, standard, and comprehensive scientific nomenclature, demonstrating a valuable application of community intelligence in knowledge curation.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Humans
  • Intelligence*
  • Knowledge*
  • Terminology as Topic*

Grants and funding

This work was supported by grants from National Natural Science Foundation of China (60803050, 61132009), the “100-Talent Program” of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Y1SLXb1365), and National Programs for High Technology Research and Development (863 Program; Grant No. 2012AA020409), the Ministry of Science and chnology of the People’s Republic of China. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.