Page:The digital public domain.pdf/164

Rh CC “methodology” and design, consisting of a human-readable deed with iconographic representations of rights and obligations and metadata.

Included in this suite is a set of contracts developed in-house at Science Commons. This follows a two-tiered approach intended to allow for transfer among non-profit institutions as well as for transfers from non-profit institutions to for-profit companies for internal research uses (non-commercial use). For the former, we standardised the existing UBMTA and SLA. For the latter, we developed a suite of standard MTAs with modular options, guided by principles derived from the NIH Principles and Guidelines relating to the sharing of biomedical resources. In particular, we implemented the NIH Guidelines with respect to defining “non-commercial use” in this space.


 * 4. Open source knowledge management

The last component needed to achieve a research Web is a way to manage all of this knowledge. Everything that we do at Science Commons takes an open source knowledge management approach. With access to the content, the data, and the physical materials, what remains is a method for fully utilising all of the information available. Science Commons is building its work using the Semantic Web as its platform. We are firm believers that the Semantic Web offers great potential for exploiting the legal access to digital knowledge and research materials through open source data integration and knowledge management.

The work previously discussed in regards to content, data, and physical materials comes together in a single proof-of-concept project: the Neurocommons. The project brings together the tools and techniques from each of these projects, serving as a proving ground for commons-based “e-science” or the research Web as we envision it to be.

The Neurocommons serves as our pilot knowledge management project with a focus specifically on the brain sciences. The goal is to enable scientists to ask very complex questions and receive precise answers, like the aforementioned question looking for potential drug targets for Alzheimer’s disease, and receive a list of genes, rather than 250,000 web pages that may be loosely associated with the topic area. This method is not new. Pharmaceutical companies have utilised such systems, in a proprietary and closed manner, for quite some time. However, to our knowledge the Neurocommons is the first iteration of such a system that