Jointly creating digital abstracts: dealing with synonymy and polysemy

BACKGROUND: Ideally each Life Science article should get a ‘structured digital abstract’. This is a structured summary of the paper’s findings that is both human-verified and machine-readable. But articles can contain a large variety of information types and contextual details that all need to be reconciled with appropriate names, terms and identifiers, which poses a challenge to any curator. Current approaches mostly use tagging or limited entry-forms for semantic encoding. FINDINGS: We implemented a ‘controlled language’ as a more expressive representation method. We studied how usable this format was for wet-lab-biologists that volunteered as curators. We assessed some issues that arise with the usability of ontologies and other controlled vocabularies, for the encoding of structured information by ‘untrained’ curators. We take a user-oriented viewpoint, and make recommendations that may prove useful for creating a better curation environment: one that can engage a large community of volunteer curators. CONCLUSIONS: Entering information in a biocuration environment could improve in expressiveness and user-friendliness, if curators would be enabled to use synonymous and polysemous terms literally, whereby each term stays linked to an identifier.