SciBrowser: a computational ethnography tool to explore open source science communities

Abstract

Collaborative knowledge production in open source science communities such as Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) is poorly understood. In this paper, we present the components of a software system that is used to conduct computational ethnography and examine the growth and evolution of the OBO community. OBO is comprised of a global network of communities that are engaged in developing formal ontologies to standardize data acquisition and use in the health sciences community. The process involved in collecting and parsing open source data is presented along with a discussion of multiple socio-technical networks generated from the raw data. We evaluate the characteristics and topological change of the structure of a selected subdomain within the OBO community in terms of social network metrics.