W3C Media Advisory and Calendar Listing for W3C Workshop on Life Sciences

http://www.w3.org/ -- 28 July 2004 -- The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is pleased to announce its first ever workshop for the Life Sciences community.

WHAT: World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Workshop on Semantic Web for Life Sciences

The W3C is organizing a Workshop to assess the current needs and future applications of the Semantic Web for the Life Sciences Community and to learn what specification or coordination efforts may be needed to support this area.

WHY: Opportunity to accelerate advances in human health by better understanding and sharing complex data

The W3C recognizes the opportunity to accelerate advances in human health through the application of an interoperable system to document, track, analyze, and facilitate the integration large amounts of data being generated by the life sciences community. The W3C is sponsoring a workshop to discuss emerging and future applications of Semantic Web for Life Sciences (SW-LS), and to get feedback on what additional specification or coordination efforts might be necessary to support this area. Specifically, how can Semantic Web technologies such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), along with community specific standards such as the Life Sciences Identifier (LSID) help to manage the inherent complexity of modern life sciences research, enable disease understanding, and accelerate the development of new therapies for disease?

WHEN: 27-28 October, 2004

WHERE: Kendall Square Area, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

WHO: Attendees may include representatives from:

• Organizations that represent industry sectors on pharmaceutical development and discovery
• Organizations that represent industry sectors related to pharmaceutical development (such as software vendors and developers of content databases)
• Organizations that represent industry sectors related to genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and other emerging biotechnology platforms for data generation
• Technologists from academia and industry who are experimenting with Semantic Web, Web Services and related technologies
• Organizations that are developing standards that may use Semantic Web or Web Services technologies in Life Sciences applications.
• Academic scholars and organizations that are actively publishing Life Sciences data and ontologies on the Web
• Organizations that represent industry sectors publishing peer-reviewed scientific article
• Government regulators and policy makers (and members of their staff) from around the world

HOW: Invitation of position papers

We are inviting position papers that discuss technology and/or policy considerations for the future of SW-LS. The results of this workshop will inform W3C's decision making on future SW-LS-related efforts, stimulate discussions of new applications of Semantic Web that are possible based on the current RDF and OWL specifications, explore the Life Sciences Identifier (LSID) technology (an accepted OMG standard developed through the Interoperable Informatics Infrastructure Consortium) and facilitate coordination with organizations engaged in related efforts.

About the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

The W3C was created to lead the Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability. It is an international industry consortium jointly run by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) in the USA, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) headquartered in France and Keio University in Japan. Services provided by the Consortium include: a repository of information about the World Wide Web for developers and users, and various prototype and sample applications to demonstrate use of new technology. To date, nearly 400 organizations are Members of the Consortium. For more information see http://www.w3.org/

 

Contact Americas and Australia --

Karen Myers, <karen@w3.org>, +1.617.253.5884 or +1.978.502.6218

Contact Europe --

Marie-Claire Forgue, <mcf@w3.org>, +33.492.38.75.94

Contact Asia --

Yasuyuki Hirakawa <chibao@w3.org>, +81.466.49.1170