IntelliGenWiki: An Intelligent Semantic Wiki for Life Sciences

The rapid growth of the scholarly literature makes the management and curation of the available information a labor-intensive and time-consuming task for researchers, during which significant knowledge can be easily missed. To address this problem, efforts have been made to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques as a means to (semi-)automatically improve the exhaustive analysis of the available information. In order to make these NLP techniques more end-user friendly and integrate them with knowledge management workflows, we developed IntelliGenWiki, a novel combination of a wiki system with state-of-the-art techniques from the NLP and Semantic Computing domains. Wikis are well known as an easy-to-use, collaborative platform for creating and organizing knowledge. For example, the Gene Wiki project (Huss III et al, 2010) applies community intelligence to the annotation of gene and protein functions. However, existing approaches rely on a manual analysis of the literature. With IntelliGenWiki, we aim to leverage the collaborative nature of wikis by introducing new Human-AI collaboration patterns: Our goal is to provide text mining assistants that work together with humans on literature analysis tasks, like curation or the generation of semantic metadata, which can be used in an Linked Open Data context. IntelliGenWiki is based on an open service-oriented architecture: it can be applied to different projects by deploying custom NLP analysis pipelines suitable for the specific task and domain. Here, we demonstrate the benefits of this approach within a collaborative literature curation context.