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Harnessing the Semantic Web to
Answer Scientific Questions:
A Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group demo
Agenda
• Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group
• Scientific Use Case
• Technological Approach
• Demo
• Benefits of the Semantic web
Health Care & 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
More details on HCLS are available at:
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/hcls/
Scientific Use Case
• Use case focuses on Alzheimer’s Disease (AD)
• AD is a devastating illness that impacts x million
people worldwide
• Incidence of AD is increasing at x %
• Many different and conflicting hypotheses about AD
• The demo evaluates competing hypotheses using
publicly available scientific data
Scientific Data Sets
• Integration and analysis of x heterogeneous data sets
•
Hypothesis, Genome, Pathways, Disease, etc.
Picture of linked data sets goes here…
Technological Approach
• Convert data to RDF and manage in triple store
• Maintain data in original data store and map to RDF
• All bio-entities were assigned URIs
• Careful modeling to integrate data sources
• Query data with SPARQL and x
AD Hypotheses
The scientific hypotheses that we explored were:
xxx
xxx
xxx
xxx
Benefits of the Semantic Web
• Integration of heterogeneous data
• Annotation of data
• Hierarchical data representation
• Easier re-use / recombination of data
• Machine processable approach
• Enables advanced inferencing
• Inconsistencies can be identified
Conclusions
• Semantic Web provides ability to query across many
disparate data sources to discover new insights
• Identifies patterns and insights across many data
sources - no longer possible with brain power alone
• Data needs to be carefully modeled - It’s not magic!
• Flexible re-use of data, which is important in a
discipline where knowledge is frequently updated