Our recent HCLS gatherings went very well in both Boston and Raleigh, with both dinners and discussions. In Boston, we had a fun chat, with a group of people somewhat diminished in size due to the volcano effect. We talked about opportunities presented by the ARRA and increased attention to Electronic Health Records. EHR’s have remained a topic of discussion and HCLS is now looking to create a demo that employs EHR scenarios. We are now actively seeking clinical data that could be used build a Semantic Web demo that is realistic to clinical practitioners. Offers of data or help of any kind will be welcomed.
Also, especially since C-SHALS, provenance has become a key theme of research. The BioRDF task force has been working on the best way to model the origins of microarray data (gene lists, experimental conditions, etc.). The Scientific Discourse task has been looking at how to model the origins of both statements made in discussion groups and computational experiments such as those stored at myExperiment.org and Research Objects. BioRDF and SciDisc have recently begun a joint teleconference to discuss provenance overlaps. Translational Medicine Ontology task force has also begun looking at provenance issues.
Great news! NCBO has made it possible for linked data projects to link directly to NCBO hosted ontologies via an *experimental* SPARQL endpoint. Point your browsers at http://sparql.bioontology.org:8080/webui/ and your programs at http://sparql.bioontology.org:8080/sparql/ . This is great news to HCLS because we can build demonstration applications that make direct use of these knowledge resources (includes all of OBO and more)! Although feature requests will be collected, please don’t expect too much of this young but valuable resource at this early stage. It’s a prototype!