Introduction

Dear All,

My name is Scott Marshall and I am a postdoc researcher in the
Integrative Bioinformatics Unit at the University of Amsterdam - a
relatively new multi-disciplinary group of researchers that emerged
from the MicroArray Department. Our group is responsible for the
"Bioinformatics Application Layer" of a Dutch project called the
Virtual Laboratory e-science project (VL-e) [1], which aims to create
general e-science facilities for several different disciplines.

A few of our group's long-term goals will sound familiar:

* To enable computational experiments for biology research to be
conducted in terms of concepts, with transparent access to workflow and
grid resources such as data, knowledge models, and (web)services.

* To make the disclosure of semantics and data provenance an essential
part of experimental data production. We hope that this will convert
databases and repositories from 'data graveyards' into reuseable data
pools and allow data to serve as evidence linked to knowledge models.

* Our goal of knowledge capture includes the hypothetical knowledge that
is prevalent in many areas of biology research. Such knowledge cannot be
expressed in the 'crisp' logic currently employed by OWL and related W3C
standards. Therefore, we are interested in standards for
representing and reasoning about uncertainty and probabilistic knowledge.

Some of these ideas are outlined in our Semantic Web for Life Sciences
position paper [2] for the workshop in Boston in 2004. Currently, our
specific areas of (semantic web) application are Huntington's Disease
and chromatin research, where we have begun implementing a semantic
web approach to data integration.

best,
scott

[1] http;//www.vl-e.nl
[2]
http://mad-db.science.uva.nl:10080/MADfiles/PositionPaperW3C_2004_final.pdf

-- 
M. Scott Marshall
tel. +31 (0) 20 525 7765
http://staff.science.uva.nl/~marshall
http://ibu.micro-array.nl/
Integrative Bioinformatics Unit, University of Amsterdam

Received on Tuesday, 14 February 2006 15:00:19 UTC