Word Add-in For Ontology Recognition

The Word Add-in For Ontology Recognition was designed to be an Word 2007 add-in that enables the annotation of Word documents based on terms that appear in Ontologies.

Microsoft External Research’s goal with this project is to enable communities who maintain ontologies to more easily experiment and to enhance the experience of authors who use Microsoft Word for content creation, incorporating semantic knowledge into the content.

This add-in should simplify the development and validation of ontologies, by making ontologies more accessible to a wide audience of authors and by enabling semantic content to be integrated in the authoring experience, capturing the author’s intent and knowledge at the source, and facilitating downstream discoverability.

The goal of the add-in is to assist scientists in writing a manuscript that is easily integrated with existing and pending electronic resources. The major aims of this project are to add semantic information as XML mark-up to the manuscript using ontologies and controlled vocabularies (using OBO), and to integrate manuscript content with existing public data repositories.

As part of the publishing workflow and archiving process, the terms added by the add-in, providing the semantic information, can be extracted from Word files, as they are stored as custom XML tags as part of the content. The semantic knowledge can then be preserved as the documented is converted to other formats, such as HTML or the XML format from the National Library of Medicine, which is commonly used for archiving.

The full benefit of semantic-rich content will result from an end-to-end approach to the preservation of semantics and metadata through the publishing pipeline, starting with capturing knowledge from the subject experts, the authors, and enabling this knowledge to be preserved when published, as well as made available to search engines and presented to people consuming the content.

This project resulted from an initial and ongoing collaboration between Microsoft External Research and Dr. Phil Bourne and Dr. Lynn Fink, at the University of California San Diego. Additional collaboration with the staff from Science Commons aims to make the add-in relevant to a wider audience and also to preserve semantic data along the publishing pipeline.