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.
Highlights
With the exponentially increasing volume of knowledge, harnessing community intelligence in knowledge curation has gained significant attention to deal with communication and education in the flood of scientific knowledge [1,2]
The openness of editorial capacity to the community may lead to potential vandalism, it is reported that Wikipedia achieves more content coverage than BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) and CNN (Cable News Network) combined [3] and rivals the traditional Encyclopedia in accuracy [4,5]
Leading voices in biological knowledge curation published an article in Nature to elaborate the current state and future of knowledge curation; they stated that keeping biological knowledge up-to-date and comprehensive is increasingly lagging behind knowledge creation, inevitably requiring a large number of people getting involved in knowledge curation [7]
Summary
With the exponentially increasing volume of knowledge, harnessing community intelligence in knowledge curation has gained significant attention to deal with communication and education in the flood of scientific knowledge [1,2]. A successful example that engages community intelligence in knowledge aggregation is Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org), an online encyclopedia allowing any user to create/edit any content. As wiki features community-based knowledge curation, up-to-date content, and low cost for maintenance [9] ± there are limitations of using open wikis for knowledge management [10], more than a dozen biological knowledge wikis have been constructed to date [11±29], attempting to exploit the whole power of the scientific community for collective and collaborative knowledge curation [30,31].
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
