Missouri Botanical Garden

The Missouri Botanical Garden will create a public-resource computing application that digitizes and automatically indexes vast amounts of scientific literature, ultimately providing users with an integrated Web portal for the discovery of information about plants. SciLINC (Scientific Literature Indexing on Networked Computers) will use Internet-connected personal computers (PCs) to analyze data when the PC is not active. (The applications generally run in the form of a screen saver, taking advantage of unused computer processing power.) SciLINC, 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 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.