Many months ago, Tony Hey, Evely Viegas, and I were invited to write a “viewpoint” article for the Communications of the ACM. It should be of no surprise that we chose to write about “Semantic Computing” as it relates to research.

While the focus of my contribution to “The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery” book was about a future where a semantics-aware infrastructure is already in place, this article concentrates on some very interesting projects supported by Microsoft’s External Research group and how they relate to that ultimate vision of a “smart” cyberinfrastructure. The BioLit, the Chem4Word, Zentity, and myExperiment projects are briefly discussed. We call for the research community to invest more in the development of tools and infrastructure in this space.

A “smart” cyberinfrastructure for research:
Full text online, ACM Digital Library

BTW… My affiliation should be “Microsoft Research” and not “University of Newcastle upon Tyne” 🙂 (Update: Quickly fixed by the nice folks at CACM).