ANNOUNCEMENT: BioDASH demo

          All:

 I would like to inform everyone that the BioDASH-Haystack Semantic Web Life Science Demo can be downloaded through Eclipse (see the new Eclipse system install at http://www.w3.org/2005/04/swls/BioDash/Demo/install.html). Haystack is a protoype semantic browser (http://haystack.csail.mit.edu), with the ability to accumulate information (including RDF-OWL) from many sites. It renders this information through the use of semantic lenses (i.e., GUI + logic, see screen shots). Currently we are able to handle and merge data from Uniprot, BioPAX, OMIM, Chemistry (LS-Ont), and (as a test set for now) NCBI's SNP-DB. This list can be readily expanded by the creation of additional semantic lenses.
  
 In addition to the Haystack system run code, there is no specific Java or PERL code defined for this demo; all the views (Semantic Lenses) and aggregations are configurations using Haystack's Adenine (RDF) language. Background information on the example used in the demo can be found at http://www.w3.org/2005/04/swls/BioDash/Demo. This is a work in progress and new features will be added regularly; indeed we hope others will explore the semantic lenses defined so far, and submit new or extended versions of lenses to the site for others to try out. 
  
 This demo is to help acquaint people with Semantic Web technologies, and how some of its functionality can be applied to various life sciences challenges. It is hoped that as more people become familiar with standards such as RDF and OWL, new generations of applications and systems will emerge that address the current data integration and semantic interoperability problems facing us. Although Haystack is used in this demo, other semantic tools (e.g., SIMILE, Jena) can also be applied to the RDF-OWL data used within this demonstration.
  
 
 Please send your feedback to thepublic-semweb-lifesci@w3.org <mailto:public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>  mailing list. Future Haystack system updates can be obtained through Eclipse from  http://www.w3.org/2005/04/swls/BioDash/updateSite/ <http://www.w3.org/2005/04/swls/BioDash/updateSite/> 
  
 enjoy,
  
 Eric Neumann
 and the BioDASH team