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SourceData: a semantic platform for curating and searching figures

Nature Methods volume 14, pages 1021–1022 (2017)Cite this article

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To the Editor:

We present SourceData (http://sourcedata.embo.org), a platform that allows researchers and publishers to share scientific figures and (when available) underlying source data in a way that is machine readable and findable. SourceData is unique in its focus on the core of scientific evidence—data presented in figures—and its ability to make papers searchable based on data content. It is aimed at bridging the conventional visual and narrative description of research findings with a machine-readable representation of data and hypotheses.

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Figure 1: The SourceData searchable knowledge graph.

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Acknowledgements

The SourceData project is supported by the Robert Bosch Stiftung and EMBO (T.L.) and partially funded by Vital-IT from the SIB (I.X.). We thank the content enrichment team at Wiley and 67 Bricks for their support in the project and for the implementation of the smartfigures.net website and the members of the EMBO Press editorial team and Wiley Editorial Staff working on EMBO Press for testing and feedback during the project. We thank M. Sankar for building a Docker image of the sd-graph neo4j database.

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Author notes

  1. Nancy George & Sara El-Gebali

    Present address: EMBL-EBI, Hinxton, UK

  2. Robin Liechti, Nancy George, Lou Götz and Sara El-Gebali: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. EMBO, Heidelberg, Germany

    Nancy George, Sara El-Gebali & Thomas Lemberger

  2. Vital-IT, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Robin Liechti, Lou Götz, Anastasia Chasapi, Isaac Crespo & Ioannis Xenarios

Authors
  1. Robin Liechti
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  2. Nancy George
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  3. Lou Götz
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  4. Sara El-Gebali
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  5. Anastasia Chasapi
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  6. Isaac Crespo
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  7. Ioannis Xenarios
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  8. Thomas Lemberger
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Thomas Lemberger.

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Competing interests

T.L. is Chief Editor of Molecular Systems Biology, published by EMBO.

Integrated supplementary information

Supplementary Figure 1 Distribution of the tagged terms in SourceData.

(a) Proportion of tagged terms according to the type of the corresponding biological entity. (b) Proportions of tagged terms according to their role in the experimental design.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Figure 1, Supplementary Table 1

Life Sciences Reporting Summary

Life Sciences Reporting Summary

Supplementary Data

Definitions and curation guide (HTML).

Supplementary Software

Scripts to build the sd-graph neo4j database.

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Liechti, R., George, N., Götz, L. et al. SourceData: a semantic platform for curating and searching figures. Nat Methods 14, 1021–1022 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.4471

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