ATS, ERS Collaborate on 'Breathing Space Initiative'

The American Thoracic Society and European Respiratory Society have launched “Breathing Space,” a semantic technology pilot project that is exploring the value of compiling and mining a critical mass of data in respiratory medicine.

This new Web site features content from the ATS and ERS’s scientific journals, which together account for 30 percent of citations in the field of respiratory medicine. From this site, users can access content from the ATS’s American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology and Proceedings of the American Thoracic Society, as well as the ERS’s European Respiratory Journal and European Respiratory Review. Visitors can search these publications by author and image or further explore content by disease, gene ontology and species. When reading the full text, visitors can highlight topics and hover over the concepts to gather more information.

This project, which is supported by the Web experts at Publishing Technology and the digital marketing experts at TBI Communications, has allowed the ATS and ERS to “bring together their content and highlight the important connections between them,” said Diane Gern, publisher of the ATS journals.