SciCrunch: A Cooperative and Collaborative Data and Resource Discovery Platform for Scientific Communities

SciCrunch was designed to break down the traditional types of portal silos created by different communities and to enable re-use of annotations and curation efforts across different biomedical domains. The SciCrunch platform (SciCrunch.org) can enable a research community to easily develop their own community-specific resource portal to provide access to resources, such as databases, materials, and tools, relevant to their research area. Communities can select existing resources to include in their portal and also add new resources through the data ingestion pipeline. The SciCrunch platform uses a set of ontologies to enable data integration and semantic expansion of user queries to enhance search results across these disparate resources. Data within a portal can be accessed via the portal Web interface or programmatically via Web services. The SciCrunch platform provides data used in the Resource Identification Portal, the NIDDK Information Network, the Neuroscience Information Framework, the NCBO Resource Index, and the Monarch Initiative. Keywords— semantic web; neuroscience; diabetes; genotype; phenotype; resource identification