Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!bionet!kristoff From: kristoff@NET.BIO.NET (David Kristofferson) Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.bio-matrix Subject: re: Mike Hawley's note Message-ID: Date: 24 May 89 13:15:40 GMT References: <8905240412.AA04767@cpswh.cps.msu.edu> Organization: Natl Computer Resource for Mol. Biology Lines: 48 > mike, > i am curious about how you propose to "siphon" biological > literature into useful computer form. what does useful > mean in that context? useful for "greping". This, of course, is the major problem. > isn't there some difficulty now in biological circles > (that from the outside would appear to be rather > small circles) about the language protein > researchers use vs. the language dna researchers use? > ie, developments in one field are hard to propagate to the > other? > it'd be easy to put all the biological literature > on line. its an entire different matter to make all those > mega-Gbytes somehow accessible. > again, from the perspective of a CS person - if incorrect, > then please set me straight. The odds of rewriting all of the biological literature or that of any other discipline using a standard nomenclature are obviously zero. Nonetheless the National Library of Medicine is attempting to use medical subject headings (MESH terms) in their cataloging of the literature. Searching can then be performed using this kind of standardized vocabulary. However, one still faces the need to foot it over to the library to retrieve the text. If journals began publishing electronically, one could simply call this up on one's computer screen (simple character based terminals would, of course, be at a loss here for lack of graphics capabilities). One then gets into questions of copyright law, loss of subscription money to publishers, etc., etc. This is not a trivial problem. The building of libraries to house ever expanding shelves of journals still seems to be the preferred route. Nonetheless, I believe that this too will come to pass although it may take a few decades. It's very useful but not glamorous work. Nonetheless making literature available on-line as above would probably do more to help the progress of biology than most research projects do. Again, it would be nice to get input from someone at the NLM on progress in these areas. -- Sincerely, Dave Kristofferson BIONET Resource Manager kristoff@net.bio.net or kristofferson@bionet-20.bio.net