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The Knowledge Grid (KGrid) is a research and development program toward infrastructure capable of greatly decreasing latency between the publication of new biomedical knowledge and its widespread uptake into practice. KGrid comprises digital knowledge objects, an online Library to store them, and an Activator that uses them to provide Knowledge-as-a-Service (KaaS). KGrid's Activator enables computable biomedical knowledge, held in knowledge objects, to be rapidly deployed at Internet-scale in cloud computing environments for improved health. Here we present the Activator, its system architecture and primary functions.

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Many obstacles must be overcome to generate new biomedical knowledge from real-world data and then directly apply the newly generated knowledge for decision support. Attempts to bridge the processes of data analysis and technical implementation of analytic results reveal a number of gaps. As one example, the knowledge format used to communicate results from data analysis often differs from the knowledge format required by systems to compute advice. We asked whether a shared format could be used by both processes. To address this question, we developed a data-to-advice pipeline called ScriptNumerate. ScriptNumerate analyzes historical e-prescription data and communicates its results in a compound digital object format. ScriptNumerate then uses these same compound digital objects to compute its advice about whether new e-prescriptions have common, rare, or unprecedented instructions. ScriptNumerate demonstrates that data-to-advice pipelines are feasible. In the future, data-to-advice pipelines similar to ScriptNumerate may help support Learning Health Systems.

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INTRODUCTION: Health systems are challenged by care underutilization, overutilization, disparities, and related harms. One problem is a multiyear latency between discovery of new best practice knowledge and its widespread adoption. Decreasing this latency requires new capabilities to better manage and more rapidly share biomedical knowledge in computable forms. Knowledge objects package machine-executable knowledge resources in a way that easily enables knowledge as a service. To help improve knowledge management and accelerate knowledge sharing, the Knowledge Object Reference Ontology (KORO) defines what knowledge objects are in a formal way. METHODS: Development of KORO began with identification of terms for classes of entities and for properties. Next, we established a taxonomical hierarchy of classes for knowledge objects and their parts. Development continued by relating these parts via formally defined properties. We evaluated the logical consistency of KORO and used it to answer several competency questions about parthood. We also applied it to guide knowledge object implementation. RESULTS: As a realist ontology, KORO defines what knowledge objects are and provides details about the parts they have and the roles they play. KORO provides sufficient logic to answer several basic but important questions about knowledge objects competently. KORO directly supports creators of knowledge objects by providing a formal model for these objects. CONCLUSION: KORO provides a formal, logically consistent ontology about knowledge objects and their parts. It exists to help make computable biomedical knowledge findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. KORO is currently being used to further develop and improve computable knowledge infrastructure for learning health systems.

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Throughout the world, biomedical knowledge is routinely generated and shared through primary and secondary scientific publications. However, there is too much latency between publication of knowledge and its routine use in practice. To address this latency, what is actionable in scientific publications can be encoded to make it computable. We have created a purpose-built digital library platform to hold, manage, and share actionable, computable knowledge for health called the Knowledge Grid Library. Here we present it with its system architecture.

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Volunteers are increasingly being recruited into citizen science projects to collect observations for scientific studies. An additional goal of these projects is to engage and educate these volunteers. Thus, there are few barriers to participation resulting in volunteer observers with varying ability to complete the project's tasks. To improve the quality of a citizen science project's outcomes it would be useful to account for inter-observer variation, and to assess the rarely tested presumption that participating in a citizen science projects results in volunteers becoming better observers. Here we present a method for indexing observer variability based on the data routinely submitted by observers participating in the citizen science project eBird, a broad-scale monitoring project in which observers collect and submit lists of the bird species observed while birding. Our method for indexing observer variability uses species accumulation curves, lines that describe how the total number of species reported increase with increasing time spent in collecting observations. We find that differences in species accumulation curves among observers equates to higher rates of species accumulation, particularly for harder-to-identify species, and reveals increased species accumulation rates with continued participation. We suggest that these properties of our analysis provide a measure of observer skill, and that the potential to derive post-hoc data-derived measurements of participant ability should be more widely explored by analysts of data from citizen science projects. We see the potential for inferential results from analyses of citizen science data to be improved by accounting for observer skill.

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New web-based models of scholarly communication have made a significant impact in some scientific disciplines, but chemistry is not one of them. What has prevented the widespread adoption of these developments by chemists­and what are the prospects for adoption over time?

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It explains what the Open Archives Initiative is, its mission and how the process developed by the OAI works.

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