The mission of the Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group, part of the Semantic Web Activity, is to develop, advocate for, and support the use of Semantic Web technologies for biological science, translational medicine and health care. These domains stand to gain tremendous benefit by adoption of Semantic Web technologies, as they depend on the interoperability of information from many domains and processes for efficient decision support.
The group will:
Communications of the HCLS IG are public. This includes public meeting records and access to the archives of the public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org mailing list.
The HCLS IG welcomes active participation from representatives of W3C Member organizations. If you are part of a W3C Member organization and you already have a W3C user account, you can join the HCLS IG by filling in the participation form. Otherwise, please follow the instructions on how to become a W3C Member. Active participation means participating at the weekly phone meetings, joining the discussions on the mailing list and, possibly, and participating at the face to face meetings.
W3C also invites some individuals to participate as Invited Experts. If you would like to apply, please verify or create your W3C web account, apply for IE status, and, if accepted, join the HCLS IG.
The HCLS IG had a good year in 2009, with lots of interaction, demonstration, and outreach. HCLS was involved in: C-SHALS Tutorial, Shared Names, Bio-IT World (in Boston and Hannover), Concept Web Alliance (CWA), PRISM Forum SIG, AMIA conferences, 7th Annual Pharma Technology IT Summit, the Data Integration for the Life Sciences (DILS) Workshop, and SWAT4LS.
We held two Face2Face meetings (Boston,MA and Santa Clara,CA), organized the Workshop on Scientific Discourse at ISWC2009, and helped organize the Semantic Web Applications and Tools for the Life Sciences (SWAT4LS) in Amsterdam - all well-received. HCLS produced some deliverables such as a Translational Medicine Ontology, articles in journals and proceedings, lots of Linked Open Drug Data, three W3C Interest Group notes, an approach to query federation, and presented a new version of the Clinical Observations Interoperability demo. We also helped initiate Shared Names, participated in the development of the Concept Web Alliance demo, and won the Triplification Challenge of 2009. In 2009, several of our members have joined together to write grant proposals in both Europe and the U.S. which could provide more support for some HCLS activities. BTW, another way to support those activities is to join us (see top of page for instructions)!
A development that I am excited about is the collaborative effort involving HCLS and CWA and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) to create a SPARQL endpoint for Uniprot. Such an endpoint could make it possible to perform essential bioinformatics information retrieval without ever leaving the comfort of your SPARQL query interface.
I'm writing to you from Stanford, California where I am visiting the Musen Lab, home of the National Center for Biomedical Computing (NCBO), and the creators of BioPortal and Protégé. NCBO just put in for a renewal grant so keep your fingers crossed! In HCLS, we hope to see continued support for the very valuable knowledge resources that have been made available to biomedical researchers by NCBO. HCLS is looking at how to incorporate BioPortal services into our demonstrations.
The Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group is pleased to announce the publishing of three Interest Group notes by the Scientific Discourse Task Force:
These notes describe how one can use the Semantic Web to express and integrate scientific data from different domains and from heterogeneous services. It is hoped that they will inspire further contributions to the ongoing work of the Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group and its Scientific Discourse Task Force, as well as inspire those in other domains to exploit the Semantic Web. On a related topic, the Interest Group holds a Workshop on Scientific Discourse next monday ISWC 2009
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