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.