ESND: A wiki-based, Publicly Editable and Open-content Platform For English-to-Chinese Scientific Nomenclature
A platform named English-to-Chinese Scientific Nomenclature Dictionary (ESND; http://esnd.big.ac.cn) has been developed recently by Professor ZHANG Zhang and his team at Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, associated with research teams at School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, and Research Institute of Subtropical Forestry, Chinese Academy of Forestry.
ESND is a wiki-based, publicly editable and open-content platform, exploiting the whole power of the scientific community in collectively and collaboratively managing English-to-Chinese scientific nomenclature. In ESND, each wiki page represents a specific term, which generally contains a collection of relevant information, including English abbreviation, English interpretation, Chinese interpretation, Chinese translation(s), and the corresponding detailed note(s) (see a screenshot below). Each term may contain more than one Chinese translation and the note provides a detailed explanation for the corresponding translation.
To identify which translation is more acknowledged by the scientific community, ESND also incorporates a “vote” function to engage community intelligence in dealing with multiple translations for a given English term. In addition, every term in ESND incorporates an open comment function as well as a corresponding discussion page, which can help users make comments and raise discussions for any debatable issue. To adding new terms, users can adopt a provided open template on ESND for creating new wiki pages in correspondence to new terms.
ESND currently focuses on biological terms, addition of more scientific nomenclature from different fields will be developed and user interface for term management will be improved. 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.
Screenshot of the term “Exon” in ESND (http://esnd.big.ac.cn/index.php/Exon)
Paper link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23451119
CONTACT:
Prof.ZHANG Zhang
Email: zhangzhang@big.ac.cn
