Download Free Microsoft Open Source Ontology Word 2007 Plug-ins

In a move designed to contribute to the evolution of collaboration and connection via the web through scientific research documents, Microsoft has made available for download two plug-ins set up to bridge Word 2007 with Science Commons ontologies. Both the Ontology Add-in for Office Word 2007 and the Creative Commons Add-in for Office Word 2007 are offered as open-source projects under the Ms-PL license, free of charge via CodePlex, the Redmond company’s repository for open-source projects.

“The Web is broken for scientific researchers — full of hyperlinks of scholarly articles, but it is nearly impossible for us to find what we need,” explained John Wilbanks, vice president for Science at Creative Commons. “The semantic Web tool will help bridge the gap between basic research and meaningful discovery, unlocking the value of research so more people can benefit from the work scientists are doing.”

The Word add-in for ontology recognition is offered as a Technology Preview, enabling authors of scientific documents to leverage the possibility to add not only hyperlinks but also semantic annotations in relation to terms in Ontologies. Shared vocabularies authored and administered by academia for various field of studies are referred to as Ontologies. In addition, the Creative Commons VSTO Add-in for Microsoft Office 2007, now at version 1.01, is also an Office 2007 plug-in linking the productivity suite with the Creative Commons web service, and in this manner enabling document authors to not only generate but also embed XML and bitmap versions of Creative Commons licenses in their files.

“Microsoft External Research is sharing our technology and innovation with open source communities with a common goal to help drive research and education forward,” added Lee Dirks, director of Education and Scholarly Communication at Microsoft Research. “By making available a Technology Preview release of the Add-in, as well as its source code, we are facilitating further developments in the ontology field and increasing our engagement with developers, scholars, publishers and information repositories interested in improving the availability of semantically rich content on the Web, and enabling a consistent end-to-end experience — from authoring to publishing.”


The Ontology Add-in for Office Word 2007 is available for download here.

The Creative Commons Add-in for Office Word 2007 is available for download here.