[DRAFT] Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group Charter

Motivations

The Semantic Web can help us realize the general goal of facilitating research and analytics in the focus areas of biological science and health care, and their application to translational medicine.

Biological Science

An understanding of the fundamental underlying principles of biology forms the basis on which all biomedical research relies. Biological research investigates phenomena at a range of scales: molecules, cells, cell populations, tissues, organs, organisms, populations, and ecosystems and employs an astounding variety of experimental techniques, instruments and reagents. This research (e.g. gene expression, phenotypes, chemical screening, ...) generates data and conclusions from which new hypotheses are drawn which subsequently propel new studies at an ever increasing rate. The resulting proliferation of isolated databases hampers efforts to combine results.

The HCLS IG focus area will aid this enterprise and provide ways for researchers in the applied fields to make the best use of the richness of this rapidly accumulating knowledge. HCLS IG activities in the this area will include working with key data repositories towards their semantic integration by advocating for and assisting labs, database creators and publishers who would make information accessible using Semantic Web technologies. The group will apply ontologies to the integration of heterogeneous data, show how common analysis tools can use data from and publish to the Semantic Web, and explore other ways that Semantic Web technologies might further facilitate this scientific work. The IG will also adapt ontologies to meet the needs for evolving biological and evidence models imposed by new techniques and instruments such as next-gen sequencing.

Health Care

join Pharmaceutical companies and individual patients, exploiting advances in translational medicine and informational infrastructure, are joining clinical interests in recording detailed patient records. meaning As governments and patient advocacy groups demand improved performance from electronic patient records, such as research or clinical decision support, integ clinicians, pharmaceutical companies and individuals with versatile semantic infrastructure will benefit from health care data which is easy to integrate with genomics, bio-informatics, chem-informatics and environmental data. This HCLS IG activity will focus on applying the strengths of Semantic Web technologies directly relevant to meeting this demand. unity A primary goal will be to aid in efforts to unify the collection of data for the purpose of both primary care (electronic medical records) and clinical research (patient recruitment, study management, outcomes-based longitudinal analysis, etc.). interop Enabling semantic interoperability across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries through sharing and linking of such data is an important part of this goal.

This interest group will work towards promoting this goal in several ways. DCHL7 First, it will attempt to work with ongoing efforts to standardize and harmonize the acquisition and exchange of medical data led by standard bodies such as the CDISC, Health Level Seven (HL7) and BRIDG, enabling the use of these standards with Semantic Web technologies. Onts Second, it will collaborate with efforts focused on building formal ontologies for clinical medicine and investigations expressed in Semantic Web languages such as OWL and RDFS. TermMap Finally, it will explore enabling interoperability through the documentation of mappings between terminologies.

clinical dec supp Another topic of interest is building innovative clinical decision support capabilities into patient record systems. Our task in this area is to identify best practices for clinical guideline representation in such a way that standards-based reasoning systems and knowledge sources can be leveraged in these patient record systems.