Considerations about the implementation of a public knowledge base regarding nanotechnology

Abstract

Nanotechnology ranks among the key technologies that will bring fundamental changes to basic research, many industry sectors and daily life. However, consumers often miss reliable and understandable information on nanomaterials. To create this transparency, the DaNa project collects and evaluates the latest scientific literature before publishing these on the website www.nanoobjects.info. Though all published articles are designed to meet the needs of different recipient groups, a certain knowledge about nanomaterials is presumed due to the nanomaterial-specific structuring of the website. This poses a barrier for interested laymen who usually have a particular nano-related application in mind. These application-oriented facts on nanomaterials already exist on the website but are scattered throughout the different articles. To overcome this, we first analyzed the state of the scattered information and then assessed requirements for a new tool displaying these facts: storage of extracted knowledge in a homogenous way, visualization options and integration of the new database into the existing content management system. We therefore extended our backend to capture knowledge on a semantically higher level in a database called DaNaVis. Based on this database we can increase the accessibility of DaNa's project results by means of interactive visualization components.