HCLS/HCLSIG DemoHomePage HCLSIG Demo/Slides

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Demo Slides

  • 1. Title
  • Harnessing the Semantic Web to Answer Scientific Questions. A Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group demo
  • Alan Ruttenberg, Science Commons
  • Susie Stephens, Eli Lilly


  • 2. Agenda
  • W3C’s Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group
  • Scientific Use Case
  • Technological Approach
  • Benefits of the Semantic Web


  • 3. W3C’s Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group
  • HCLSIG is chartered to develop and support the use of Semantic Web technologies and practices to improve collaboration, research and development, and innovation adoption in the of Health Care and Life Science domains
  • http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/hcls/


  • 4. Scientific Use Case
  • The use case focuses on Alzheimer’s Disease
  • AD is a devastating illness that impacts 26.6 million people worldwide
  • Prevalence is predicted to quadruple to 106.8 million by 2050
  • Many different types of evidence need to be integrated
  • An active Web community for Alzheimer research exists [Susie, I think this is an important point; that this demo is a stepping stone to deployment of Semantic Web to an actual biomedical community.]


  • 5. Scientific Data Sets
  • Integration and analysis over many heterogeneous data sets

Hypothesis, Genome, Pathways, Phenome, Disease, etc.

  • (pretty picture)


  • 7. Technological Approach
  • Convert legacy data to RDF/OWL and manage in triple store
  • Mapping of legacy data types to RDF/OWL
  • Entities were assigned URIs
  • Careful modeling of data
  • Query with SPARQL and x


  • 6. Scientific Hypothesis
  • Amyloid beta peptide may impair memory by inhibiting long-term potentiation (LTP)
  • Research Questions
      By what mechanism does amyloid beta inhibit LTP?
      Can we identify a novel therapeutic target based on this mechanism?
      How can we validate the therapeutic target?


  • 8. Benefits of the Semantic Web
  • Allows integration of heterogeneous data types
  • Enables the annotation of data
  • Supports hierarchical data representation
  • Easier re-use / recombination of data
  • Machine processable
  • Enables inferences
  • Inconsistencies can be identified


  • 9. Conclusions
  • Semantic Web provides ability to query across many disparate data sources to discover new insights
  • It's not magic, so data still needs to be modeled
  • Allows better reuse of data, and more advanced inferencing
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