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What is a concept?

A concept is a ‘unit of thought’ and is in essence not ‘lingual’. By virtue of being a discrete unit of thought, concepts are intrinsically non-ambiguous. However, lingual or computational references to the concept (terms and identifiers) can be highly ambiguous and confusing. Computers have great difficulty to resolve ambiguity in free text. It is therefore of the utmost importance that terms and identifiers in free text and structured data sources are first mapped to concepts before being used to ‘interconnect data’ in other information resources. If not resolved first, ambiguity will lead to massive mismatches and confusion.

Find and edit your favorite Biomedical concept

Concept Wiki presently has two domains, ConceptWiki and WikiPeople, where you can find more than a million biomedical concepts, and more than million authors. More importantly, you can add your own knowledge to the concept of your choice or you can maintain and modify a page that lists your own published works and concepts of interest.

Portals

Proteins portal: WikiProteins main page
WikiPeople portal: WikiPeople main page

The ConceptWiki environment is an umbrella for several categories of professional data. Presently, two Wikis, WikiPeople and WikiProteins, have been filled using information provided by several consortium members to jumpstart a medium capable of developing valuable knowledge repositories. The main focus of WikiProteins is on life science and medical concepts and their role in biology and disease. In WikiProteins, scientists can add new or edit existing textual commentary, for example, to nuance or describe new biological functions or processes. It will also be possible to establish links between two records to illustrate pertinent connections. All modifications are attributed to the participating scientist and certain granting agencies have indicated that they are interested in using the resulting contributions as indices of scholarly achievement. WikiPeople is a forum for scientists that displays their published works but can be modified and enhanced by the individual.
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