Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences (HCLS) Interest Group

The W3C Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group recently had a very successful Face to Face meeting in Boston, U.S. Although a few of us were meeting F2F for the first time, we had worked together through teleconferences, irc, and e-mail. There were also a number of organizations represented, some of them for the first time, such as caBIG, Bio2RDF, NCBO, Mayo Clinic, and Ontotext, as well as a few organizations invited from BioIT World Expo to join us. Our two day agenda included talks by Maryann Martone and David de Roure, and can be seen here. Our sponsors were myExperiment and Elsevier Labs. All in all, it was good to be among friends and colleagues. The ideas and feedback that we gathered should result in renewed vigor among the task forces. Several other related events seem to show that Semantic Web is gaining mass: Shared Names meeting, Concept Web Alliance inaugural meeting, and the Semantic Web SIG at the PRISM Forum meeting.

Having grown to almost 100 participants and 6 active task forces, the HCLS IG will hold a Face to Face (F2F) meeting in the Stata Center in Boston on April 30 and May 1 (Thu and Fri), directly following the Bio-IT World Expo, as well as a Shared Names meeting that we helped to organize. We are excited to have Karen Skinner (NIH) and David De Roure (Southampton University/myExperiment) as invited speakers. We plan to take a close look at the opportunities for alignment and new activities within the HCLS IG. The latest demonstrations and prototype development have made participants aware of new possibilities for cooperation within the group. Participants are encouraged to add their names to the list of attendees on the F2F wiki page. Prospective members are requested to send e-mail to the co-chairs.

The HCLS IG gave a tutorial at the C-SHALS Conference last week. It was very well attended and consisted of participants from pharma, payers, health care organizations, technology companies, and academia.

The first half of the tutorial began with a primer on the Semantic Web that was delivered by Lee Feigenbaum. He did an excellent job of introducing the technology, and answering a broad range of good questions from the participants.

The second half of the tutorial began with Eric Prud'hommeaux (W3C) introducing HCLS. He highlighted that the mission of the group is to develop, advocate for, and support the use of Semantic Web technologies for biological science, translational medicine, and health care; and described the strong need for interoperability within these domains. He highlighted that almost 100 individuals are now participating in the interest group.

The tutorial then provided an overview of the activities being undertaken by the different tasks within HCLS. Vipul Kashyap (Cigna) described how the Clinical Observations Interoperability task built a demo that enables querying across electronic health records that are in different formats. John Madden (Duke) presented on work within the Terminology task to represent SNOMED within Semantic Web representations, and compared benefits of SKOS to OWL. Susie Stephens (Lilly) presented on making publicly available data sets about drugs available within the Linked Data cloud, which is ongoing work within the Linking Open Drug Data task. She also briefly introduced the new Pharma Ontology task which has the goal of creating a high-level, patient-centric ontology for translational medicine. Tim Clark (Harvard) represented the Scientific Discourse task and described their approach for integrating knowledge relating to hypotheses derived from literature and experiments using SWAN, SIOC, and myExperiment ontologies. The tutorial concluded with Kei Cheung (Yale) providing a description of the accomplishments on aTags and federated query within the BioRDF task.

Slides are available from the tutorial on the HCLS Wiki.

The W3C Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group recently had a successful Face to Face meeting co-located with the Technical Plenary / Advisory Committee Meetings Week in Mandelieu, France. Our two day agenda included several excellent and thought provoking presentations, as well as task updates and task breakout sessions. Being co-located with the Technical Plenary enabled us to directly interact with several other groups and get the latest updates for work such as the Rule Interchange Format (RIF), OWL, Policy Language Interest Group, and others active in Semantic Web. The meeting stimulated several new ideas and interactions that are now being discussed during our teleconferences. We also took part in Semantic Web demonstrations during the Technical Plenary session that featured the HCLS Knowledge Base, as well as the new query translation technology from Eric Prud'hommeaux that is being deployed in the Clinical Observations Interoperability demonstration.

Chime Ogbuji, Scott Marshall and I are very excited to be co-chairing the new W3C Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG). We'd like to start off by giving a big thank you to Eric Neumann and Tonya Hongsermeier for having chaired the first HCLSIG, and for having got such a great group of people involved. We are going to be hosting an initial kickoff call between 11am and 12.30pm ET on June 12, where we will introduce the group, describe the benefits of joining, summarize the new charter, highlight our thoughts for interesting projects, and share details about the first F2F meeting. This is an excellent time for new people to join the HCLSIG. If you are interested in learning more, or participating in the call, please send an email to the co-chairs at: team-hcls-chairs@w3.org

HCLS IG rechartered

See the new charter and the call for participation.