RE: Draft Charter for Semantic Web for Health-care and Life Sciences Group

Dear List Members,

In response to Eric Millers statement @ http://www.w3.org/2005/04/swls/:

"Many participants of the Workshop who are now implementing semantic web
technologies to solve life science problems, or who are considering options
for doing so, expressed interest in an ongoing forum for sharing
implementation experience. The public-semweb-lifesci list provides a forum
for these discussions."

To those participants who are now implementing semantic web technologies:

I have been learning about this work over the past few months in my free
time as I search for employment.  If there is an opportunity in industry or
academics for an application developer/tester/troubleshooting or a student
to work on an implementation, I am available and interested to get started
ASAP.  Please email me directly for more information (kevinabbey@gmail.com).

To those who are considering options for doing so:

The ISO standard for Topic Maps has remained unused as far as I know in the
life sciences.  From the few applications that I have tried and read about I
see great potential for topic map use in additon to current efforts.  I
expect they will eventually interoperable with RDF (see this link for
details  http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/RDFTM/) .   Is there a
reason for not using the applications/standard of topic maps?

In terms of the Mission statement:

I do not know the origin of RDF but topic maps originated from the problem
of index building.  As this new charter is challenged to work together with
the many related association/projects it may be useful to use the technology
as a tesing platform to organize and navigate the workspace.  Basically a
common index & visual map should reduce the complexity of the coordination
between the organizations.  Since the work is developing in time, a wiki
would also be useful where a topic map is limited.  However if the topic map
could be developed in wiki ways then we could have the best of both.  I
searched for such an application and found a beginning project called topiki
but nothing completed as far as I know: http://www.shelter.nu/blog-070.html
& http://www.infoloom.com/pipermail/topicmapmail/2004q1/005777.html
Is there any interest in setting up such a system (topic map, wiki or
topiki) or is there another alternative (in addition to the traditional
reports)?

Thank you,
Kevin C .Abbey

Received on Thursday, 1 September 2005 07:37:04 UTC