Towards Evaluating the Impact of Semantic Support for Curating the Fungus Scientific Literature

We present our ongoing development of a semantic infrastructure supporting biofuel research. Part of this effort is the automatic curation of knowledge from the massive amount of information on fungal enzymes that is available in genomics. Working closely with biologists who manually curate the existing literature, we developed ontological NLP pipelines, integrated through Web-based interfaces, to help them in two main tasks: spending less time to mine the literature for facts, while also being provided with richer and semantically linked information. An ongoing challenge is to measure precisely how much the developed semantic technologies benefit the end users and what their overall impact on the quality of the curated data is. We present preliminary evaluation results that show a significant reduction in manual curation time.