We can presently identify at least three strategies for building research maps. These strategies are not mutually exclusive. The first is a publically funded data entry effort. Specialists in various fields of research could be hired to write nano- publications for papers in their field. The database of nanopublications could then be deployed with a graphical interface. Forums, where the research community could critique the process, would be crit- ical for the development and quality con- trol of this effort.

The third strategy for building research maps builds nanopublications into the existing publication process. Different approaches could be taken toward imple- menting this strategy. For example, Microsoft has developed a plugin that as- sists authors in using ontologies to markup their text as they write. The markup could be used to render future papers machine readable. This would be an indirect approach. A more direct approach would incorporate fields for nanopublications into the templates for journal article submission. The NCBO makes an autocomplete widget for such purposes freely available. The widget will recommend terms from NCBO-hosted ontologies when a user has started typing in a data entry form field. The nano- publications resulting from filling out these forms could be published to a pub- lic database, just as abstracts are pub- lished to PubMed.

The second strategy for building research maps piggybacks on activities that are part of the research community’s typical workflow, such as note taking. From the time that they are students to the time that they are principal investigators, researchers take notes on the papers that they read. Cloud-based note taking applications (e.g., Evernote) could be used to weight, integrate, and eventually share these notes. If the workflow for note taking took the form of nanopublica- tions, papers could be transcribed into nanopublications as an automatic by- product of researchers doing what they already do. For example, a question and answer workflow could be developed for an online PDF reader. As a user reads research articles, questions about experiments are asked and, when answered, yield a database of structured notes for the user (and everyone with access to that database). This database would be useful to the user, as a simplified record of what was read, and useful for generating research maps as well.