Developers within the BIRN are developing both general-purpose and application-specific tools to provide knowledge-based support for the activities of BIRN collaborators. This will include (A) tools to support access to external knowledge resources such as the scientific literature, grant information (see nihmaps.org below) and ontologies and (B) novel methods for building local scientific knowledge bases for end-users.
Topic Maps for Grant Abstracts
This web application (www.nihmaps.org) provides a topic map of all funded grant proposals from NIH in 2007 that may be queried in several ways. The map shows the similarity of topics between grants, providing an intuitive, interactive clustered representation. Users may view patterns of grants based on changing coloring schemes, overlays and other viewing options. Future developments will include building subject-specific maps from MEDLINE for specific scientific communities and comparing these maps with others derived from CRISP.
Status: Initial version available in October 2009
Contact: Gully Burns (gully at usc dot edu)
