ScienceDaily (Nov. 28, 2006) — Publishers of electronic scientific journals should adopt approaches pioneered by online merchants and digital music purveyors in order to complete the revolution in information access that began with the first online journals, according to scientists in the United Kingdom.

Henry S. Rzepa and Omer Casher explain that online retailing and digital music management rely on "semantic" models in providing customers with highly targeted access to products. That's "semantic" as in the Semantic Web, the project now underway to foster information exchange by putting documents with computer-processable meaning (semantics) on the Internet so that software agents can help in the dissemination of information.

In a report scheduled for the Nov. 27 issue of the bimonthly ACS Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, the researchers describe SemanticEye, a semantic web application that adapts the digital music model to chemical-related electronic journal articles. It allows journal articles to contain embedded document object identifiers (DOIs) and other material.

Those clues enable software to find relationships between new articles and those already published, and collect all the relevant documents for the user's benefit.

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