uBioRSS is a nifty service from the MBLWHOI Library at Woods Hole, which harvests bibliographic information about new articles from publishers’ RSS feeds, and then passes them through the uBio taxonomic classification system which identifies any species that are mentioned in the article, and classifies the article appropriately.

This makes it possible to browse the literature taxonomically, so that, for example you might view a list of all the latest articles on cetaceans far more easily than can be done using plain text search.

What’s more, it is possible to filter articles by source, so you an easily taxonomically browse just BioMed Central’s open access articles. The site also offers an alerting service, so you can choose to be notified of new articles which relate to your partcular taxon of interest.

uBioRSS is a great example of the way in which semantic enrichment can add value to the literature, and shows how it is particularly effective when combined with open access, as this then allows the semantic enrichment to be applied not just to the text of the tite and abstract, but to the entire full text. To see an example of this in action, check out the UBio taxonomically-enhanced PubMed Central full text search.

We see semantic enrichment as a vitally important aspect of the future development of science publishing. Watch this space for further initiatives from BioMed Central in this area.