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hierarchical taxonomies and thesauri, to more complex relationships in ontologies and knowledge graphs. There has been increased interest in
semantic enrichment in recent years. Marjorie Hlava, president of Access Innovations, attributes the increased interest to a combination of computing power and greater awareness: ‘The biggest change has been the increased power of computers. With cloud computing we have a great deal of power at our fingertips wherever we are, we are able to do a lot of the things people have dreamed about for years but couldn’t actually implement. ‘The second biggest development
is awareness. People are now aware of what semantics can do. Taxonomies and thesauri are very well established and are being widely embraced. Knowledge graphs, knowledge maps and ontologies are only beginning to be able to be implemented because they’re only partially understood, and the search algorithms to actually implement them are few and far between.’ The growth in awareness is particularly
important because it allows the emergence of collaborative projects, the building of agreed standards, and
6 Research Information Spring 2022
encourages additional tools and projects to be built on these standards.
Collaborative solutions Pistoia Alliance’s SEED project is one such collaborative semantic enrichment project. The Pistoia Alliance is a not-for- profit alliance, with more than 200 member companies and organisations from pharma, biotech and the life sciences, with a mission to lower boundaries in research and development, and to encourage innovation. As Gabrielle Whittick, the lead on the SEED project, noted: ‘Semantic enrichment is a perfect example of how we can help with that, we are able to collaborate across pharma, across different organisations.’ The SEED Project focuses on
incorporating an additional layer of semantic data into electronic lab notebooks (ELNs), as Whittick continued: ‘In R&D in science today, the data volumes are increasing exponentially, and we’re not able to get the value out of that data that we should be. There’s an incredibly high percentage of data captured in R&D that is not really useable. ‘If we can enrich the unstructured text
the scientist is capturing, which is the record of the experiment, then you have
“Semantic enrichment is the process of adding a machine-readable layer of metadata’”
information you can search on, very powerfully. You can analyse it and make decisions based on that information, because you know it’s consistent, it’s high quality. It’s information you can share externally and internally and it’s going to be the same information because we’ve used the same standards.’ Collaboration between organisations is an important part of the development of these standards, not only to ensure the widest possible knowledge acquisition and efficiencies in production, but because the standards are more valuable the more widely they are adopted. Whittick explained: ‘The success
of these types of activities is purely dependent on collaboration across different competitors, and that collaboration only comes with building trust and therefore encouraging sharing. ‘Pistoia allows that to happen. It is quite
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