WikiProfessional (Wiki for Professionals) was an attempt to create a web-based research environment for

semantic search Semantic search denotes search with meaning, as distinguished from lexical search where the search engine looks for literal matches of the query words or variants of them, without understanding the overall meaning of the query. Semantic search seek ...

ing, providing an intuitive tool for analyzing and relating concepts. When data is entered, the system

semantically Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and compu ...

analyzed and recognized

co-occurrence In linguistics, co-occurrence or cooccurrence is an above-chance frequency of occurrence of two terms (also known as coincidence or concurrence) from a text corpus alongside each other in a certain order. Co-occurrence in this linguistic sense ...

s between different entities. The results were visualized through a "Knowlet," which is a visual representation of semantic distance between associated entities. This Knowlet is then used to notify persons that have subscribed to these entities, enabling a rapid data interchange between collaborators. The major focus was

proteins Proteins are large biomolecules and macromolecules that comprise one or more long chains of amino acid residues. Proteins perform a vast array of functions within organisms, including catalysing metabolic reactions, DNA replication, respondi ...

, using a portal named WikiProteins. It contained over a hundred million entries, "melding some of the key biomedical databases into a single information resource". Sources included: * 245,000 Proteins from

UniProt UniProt is a freely accessible database of protein sequence and functional information, many entries being derived from genome sequencing projects. It contains a large amount of information about the biological function of proteins derived fro ...

Swiss-Prot UniProt is a freely accessible database of protein sequence and functional information, many entries being derived from genome sequencing projects. It contains a large amount of information about the biological function of proteins derived fro ...

* 24,000 Gene Ontology terms from the GO Consortium * 880,000 Concepts from UMLS/ NLM * 112,000,000 Unique sentences from

Medline MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online, or MEDLARS Online) is a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medic ...

The project never passed the open beta test phase. It was operated by

Knewco Barend Mons (born 1957, The Hague) is a molecular biologist by training and a leading FAIR data specialist. The first decade of his scientific career he spent on fundamental research on malaria parasites and later on translational research for ...

and led by initiator Barend Mons, a bioinformatician at the

Erasmus MC Erasmus University Medical Center (Erasmus MC or EMC) based in Rotterdam, Netherlands, affiliated with Erasmus University and home to its faculty of medicine, is the largest and one of the most authoritative scientific University Medical Centers i ...

and Leiden University Medical Centre. Knewco was intending to profit from WikiProfessionals by charging some users (such as drug firms) for "premium services", for example incorporating a private version of the system with in-house data. After the project disappeared, a group called the Concept Web Alliance formed to try to rebuild a similarly linked database. This became ConceptWiki and the Nanopublication metadata format.

References

Free-content websites Wikis Defunct websites {{Website-stub