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WikiGenes is the first wiki system to combine the collaborative and largely altruistic possibilities of wikis with explicit authorship. In view of the extraordinary success of Wikipedia there remains no doubt about the potential of collaborative publishing, yet its adoption in science has been limited. Here I discuss a dynamic collaborative knowledge base for the life sciences that provides authors with due credit and that can evolve via continual revision and traditional peer review into a rigorous scientific tool.

There is a growing community interest in applying Semantic Web and Web 2.0 technologies in health care and life sciences areas including the Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG ; http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/hcls/) and Medicine 2.0 (http://www.medicine20congress.com/). This has motivated us to explore how to intersect these two sets of technologies in the context of the HCLS Knowledge Base (KB).

The SciLands is a mini-continent and user community in the virtual world platform Second Life devoted exclusively to science and technology. There are over 20 science and technology related organizations in the SciLands, including government agencies, universities and museums.

The Tree of Life Web Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists and nature enthusiasts from around the world. On more than 10,000 World Wide Web pages, the project provides information about biodiversity, the characteristics of different groups of organisms, and their evolutionary history (phylogeny). Each page contains information about a particular group, e.g., salamanders, segmented worms, phlox flowers, tyrannosaurs, euglenids, Heliconius butterflies, club fungi, or the vampire squid. ToL pages are linked one to another hierarchically, in the form of the evolutionary tree of life. Starting with the root of all Life on Earth and moving out along diverging branches to individual species, the structure of the ToL project thus illustrates the genetic connections between all living things.

This summary was born out of a question on Twitter and percolated to FriendFeed, which was "Who is using RDF and integrating other resources at the minute and what are those resources? From this question, several resources were highlighted

Search and get life science PDFs right away at pubget.com

Welcome to the biology portal. Biology, from the Greek words bios (life) and the suffix -ology, meaning study of, is a branch of science. It is concerned with the characteristics and behaviors of organisms, how species and individuals come into existence, and the interactions they have with each other and with their environment. Biology encompasses a broad spectrum of academic fields that are often viewed as independent disciplines. Together, they study life over a wide range of scales.

BioForge was created to encourage online collaborations between diverse research groups under BiOS-based licensing schemes. CAMBIA believes that enabling technologies in the life sciences need to remain available to anyone to improve or use in new innovations, both commercial and non-commercial.

The prototype we describe is a biomedical knowledge base, constructed for a demonstration at Banff WWW2007 , that integrates 15 distinct data sources using currently available Semantic Web technologies such as the W3C standard Web Ontology Language [OWL] and Resource Description Framework [RDF]. This report outlines which resources were integrated, how the knowledge base was constructed using free and open source triple store technology, how it can be queried using the W3C Recommended RDF query language SPARQL [SPARQL], and what resources and inferences are involved in answering complex queries. While the utility of the knowledge base is illustrated by identifying a set of genes involved in Alzheimer's Disease, the approach described here can be applied to any use case that integrates data from multiple domains.

The Bio2RDF project is a tool to convert bioinformatics data and knowledge bases to RDF format. It is a kind of generalized rdfizer for bioinformatics applications, and it is a place for the semantic web life science community to develop and grow.

The mission of Sputnik Observatory is to be the world's foremost institute dedicated to the study of contemporary culture. Sputnik Observatory manifests this commitment by documenting, archiving and disseminating the ideas that are shaping the arts, sciences and technology. Central to Sputnik Observatory's mission is the encouragement of an ever deeper understanding and enjoyment of life-long learning that aims to support the advancement of modern thought in society.

Belvedere 4.1 is designed to help support problem-based collaborative learning scenarios with concept and evidence moodels, and provides multiple representational views (tables and graphs) on those models. Belvedere was originally intended to help secondary school students learn critical inquiry skills that they can apply in everyday life as well as in science, but can be adopted to other applications as well.

A new model of evolution's origins traces the possible outlines of a critical and mysterious stage in Earth's infancy, when a few odd chemicals developed into the molecular ancestors of life as we know it.

Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, these hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering - a field long dominated by Ph.D.s toiling in university and corporate laboratories.

an international team of researchers, headed by Timothy Wright, a professor at New Mexico State University and a researcher at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, collaborated to study the early evolution of the parrots.

"Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive."

Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of "Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life," and his fellow social scientists are building the case that humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits.