Software vendor Microsoft Corp, US, and Creative Commons, a not-for-profit organisation that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, have announced the release of a semantic Ontology Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007. The web tool is projected to enable authors to easily add scientific hyperlinks as semantic annotations, drawn from ontologies, to their documents and research papers. Ontologies are shared vocabularies created and maintained by different academic domains to model their fields of study. The add-in was announced before an industry panel at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech 2009, http://en.oreilly.com/et2009).
The tool is expected to make it easier for scientists to link their documents to the web in a meaningful way. Deployed on a wide scale, ontology-enabled scientific publishing will provide a web boost to scientific discovery.
Science Commons, a division of Creative Commons, is incubating the adoption of semantic scientific publishing through the creation of a database of ontologies (http://neurocommons.org) and development of supporting technical standards and code. Microsoft Research has built a technology bridge to enable the link between Microsoft Office Word 2007 and these ontologies.
Microsoft's earlier collaboration with Creative Commons includes the June 2006 release of the Creative Commons Add-in for Office 2003. It is a copyright licensing tool that enables the easy addition of Creative Commons licensing information for works in popular Microsoft Office applications. Another collaborative move was the July 2008 release of a similar add-in for Office 2007 as part of Microsoft's Scholarly Communication life cycle of tools. Updates to both add-ins were also released during the O'Reilly conference.
