SciLINC:Scientific Literature Indexing on Networked Computers
Missouri Botanical Garden proposes
Scientific Literature Indexing on Networked Computers (SciLINC), a public-resource computing application that will automatically index large amounts of digitized scientific literature, ultimately providing users with an integrated Web portal, available at
www.botanicus.org, for the discovery of information about plants. Public-resource computing applications use internet-connected PCs to analyze data when the PC is not active. These applications generally run in the form of a screensaver, taking advantage of unused computer processing power to analyze vast amounts of data.
Our application, freely available to the general public, will analyze text from digitized botanical literature in order to return a full-text index and a keyword index for each page. These keywords will be annotated with links to other online resources-i.e. Web pages about a particular plant-allowing users of the portal to search for terms, discover where they reside in a body of digitized literature, view the appropriate pages, and click through to discover other online resources associated with that keyword. This Web portal will be an essential tool for anyone interested in learning about plants, including scientists, students, and the general public.