NCBO Webinar: Hilmar Lapp, Nov. 17 at 10:00am PT

The next NCBO Webinar will be presented by Dr. Hilmar Lapp, Assistant
Director for Informatics at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center
(NESCent) on "Bringing reason to phenotype diversity, character change, and
common descent" at 10:00am PST, Wednesday, November 17. Below is information
on how to join the online meeting via WebEx and accompanying teleconference.
For the full schedule of the NCBO Webinar presentations see:
http://www.bioontology.org/webinar-series.


ABSTRACT:
For more than a century, systematic biologists have meticulously documented
the stunning biodiversity of phenotypes across the tree of life in the
comparative systematics literature. This vast store of often complex
character and character state descriptions informs our understanding of the
evolutionary transitions that gave rise to the present diversity of life on
earth. Yet, as free text in natural language, these descriptive data are not
amenable to even simple computational processing, such as comparison of
organisms by phenotype similarity, much less large-scale data integration
and knowledge mining. I will present the approach that we have adopted
within the Phenoscape project (http://phenoscape.org) to expose these data
to machine reasoning.  Phenoscape uses the Entity-Quality (EQ) model to
transform characters and character states into formal phenotype assertions.
Data transformed in this way from the systematics literature are integrated
with mutant phenotype data from model organisms in a large knowledge base (
http://kb.phenoscape.org), in order to generate hypotheses about the genetic
causes of evolutionary character transitions. I will discuss both successes
and challenges in blending formal knowledge representation methods with
descriptive biology and hypotheses of descent.  An important remaining
challenge is a logic framework for reasoning over homology, i.e. descent
from a common ancestor, which is required for many forms of evolutionary
inference.


SPEAKER BIO:
Hilmar Lapp is the Assistant Director for Informatics at the National
Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent). His research interests are in
reusable and interoperable software and data, large-scale data integration,
and building sustainable cyberinfrastructure. A biologist by training, he
has also been programming for more than two decades, ranging from commercial
applications to real-time data acquisition to bioinformatics data
integration and standards. In his role at NESCent, he is involved in many of
the Center’s cyberinfrastructure initiatives, and serves as senior personnel
in the NSF-funded Phenoscape project (http://phenoscape.org), as well as the
Dryad digital repository for data supporting scientific publications (
http://datadryad.org). Before joining NESCent in 2006, he worked for almost
10 years in functional genome informatics in the biopharmaceutical sector.
At the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF) in San
Diego, CA, he built SymAtlas, one of the first decidedly gene-centric
database integrating genome annotation databases with gene function data.


WEBEX DETAILS:
Topic: NCBO Webinar Series
Date: Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Time: 10:00 am, Pacific Standard Time (San Francisco, GMT-08:00)
Meeting Number: 929 613 752
Meeting Password: ncbomeeting


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smartphones!)
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