strawman working group alignment for discussion

As a stimulus for thinking about today's discussion, here is a simple  
strawman categorization of current work group efforts in HCLS SIG and  
how conceivably might work together.  This is not meant to prejudge  
where each individual group might decide to go on its own.  It's  
simply my view of a way in which they might be synergistically aligned.

(1) Ontology Best Practices
Goal: Recommend and explain a set of  best practices & most useful  
current approaches for conducting our ontology-building activities.
Benefit: Educate the work groups, develop consensus on approaches,  
support useful conventions,  increase productivity of efforts

(2) Knowledge Lifecycle
Goals:
Develop an ontology & pilot applications characterizing at a high  
level,  digital resources in the lifecycle of scientific knowledge  
production and consumption, such as publications, experimental data,  
manuscripts, etc, their relationships to each other and to domain  
ontologies in general. This effort would be mainly about "containers"  
of knowledge, and their interrelationships and transitions, rather  
than characterizing the nature of the content, which would be focused  
on in Bio-RDF.
Benefit: Provide a common interoperability layer between existing  
resources and multiple domain ontologies and resources.

(3) Bio-RDF
Goals:
(a)  Develop and/or adopt useful RDF Schema representations for key  
domain ontologies and "catalog"-type resources (ie.g., GO, MeSH,  
UniProt etc) & build pilot applications which extract structured  
content from current resources and convert into RDF
(b) Assess and test technological infrastructure for supporting RDF  
representations, make recommendations and identify areas where  
further work may be needed.
Benefit: Formalize existing resource annotation and catalog resources  
sources and make them useful as real RDF content.  Provide  
information to the HCLS as a whole about technological approaches and  
their tradeoffs.

(4) Structured/Unstructured
Goal: Identify and experiment in resolving any issues specific to  
extraction of knowledge from text
Benefit: Provide a common experience base in these approaches and  
identify key impacts and needs in this area.

(5) PROCESS MODEL
Goal: Develop and/or recommend semantic web compatible approaches to  
modelling formal workflow including state machines, and  
characterizing data provenance in automated environments
Benefits: Support the integration of the extremely common pattern of  
computational pipelines of various types, into the semantic web  
paradigm, integrated with the work of the other four groups.

Best

Tim

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Tim Clark
Director of Informatics
MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease
114 16th Street / CNY 114-2012, Charlestown, MA 02129
617-947-7098 (mobile)                  617-724-1480 (fax)
www.mindinformatics.org
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Received on Thursday, 23 February 2006 13:42:17 UTC