W3C's Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group Drafts Show Power of Data Integration

The mission of the W3C Health Care and Life Sciences (HCLS) Interest Group is to show how to use Semantic Web technology to answer cross-disciplinary questions in life science that have, until now, been prohibitively difficult to research. Today the HCLS Interest Group published two Working Drafts. The first describes the construction and use of the knowledge base that was used as part of a demonstration of life sciences data integration at the the 2007 World Wide Web Conference in Banff, Canada. The second document explains the process of integrating data with an existing Semantic Web knowledge base. The success of the group continues to draw industry interest. W3C Members are currently reviewing a draft charter that would enable the renewed HCLS Interest Group to develop and support use cases that have clear scientific, business and/or technical value, using Semantic Web technologies in three areas: life science, translational medicine, and health care. W3C invites all W3C Members to review the draft charter (which is public during the review), and encourage those who are interested in using the Semantic Web to solve knowledge representation and integration on a large scale to join the Interest Group.