Supporting Sensemaking in Science

Scientists collect data, and write stories about what the data tells them. I am interested in supporting the process of sharing data and stories about data, utilizing technology, to improve and accelerate science itself. In my talk, I will cover three facets of scientific sensemaking: first, I’ll describe a model for discourse analysis of biological text; then, I’ll discuss some recent work on representing of collections of papers as claim-evidence networks, and lastly, I will propose the creation of ‘involuntary collaboratories’ of networked experiments, to allow superior reasoning over collections of content than is currently possible.

Speaker Details

Anita de Waard’s background is in experimental low-temperature physics, which she studied in Leiden and Mosow. She joined Elsevier as a physics publisher in 1988. Since 1997 she has been working as Disruptive Technology Director within the Labs division of Elsevier, with the goal of improving scientific communication using information technologies. Among other things, she worked from 1998 – 2001 on developing a modular XML Major Reference work, XPharm, and from 2001 – 2003 on the Drug Ontology Project for Elsevier, DOPE. From 2001 – 2005, she founded and ran the Reed-Elsevier Data Standards Group. In 2008, Anita co-organised the Elsevier Grand Challenge. In 2009, she ran a HypER workshop to combine various efforts on Hypotheses, Evidence and Relationships, and in 2011, she instigated the Executable Papers challenge. Anita’s focus is on establishing active research collaborations with key academic institutes in Europe and the US. She co-organised the ‘Beyond the PDF’ and ‘Force11’ workshops and is collaborating on several research projects together with different groups in the US and Europe, including Harvard, ISI/USC, Rensellear Polytechnic, the University of Manchester, and the Free University in Amsterdam. In particular, she is interested in implementing standards and cross-disciplinary frameworks for sharing annotations and content. A special area of interest is instantiating claim-evidence relationships in biomedicine within a Linked Data architecture, to improve the integration of large access-restricted and open access corpora, and improved ways of integrating workflows and research data with the scholarly narrative. She is an invited member and co-chair of the Scientific Discourse subgroup of the W3C Scientific Discourse Task within the Health Care and Life Sciences Special Interest Group. The main focus of this group is to develop semantically interoperable standards for identifying key components pertaining to argumentation in full-text scientific documents. Developments within the aegis of this group include a use case to automatically identify drug-drug interactions of large corpora and the creation semantic standards for Linked Data nodes to allow access to this data.

For a brief biography, see: http://elsatglabs.com/labs/anita/

For a recent list of my publications, see: http://scholar.google.com/citations?sortby=pubdate&hl=en&user=LUXisTcAAAAJ&view_op=list_works

For some recent presentations, see: http://slideshare.net/anitawaard