Re: BioRDF [Telcon]: slides for the UMLS presentation

William Bug wrote:
> 
> If the goal of the semantic web were to serve end users only, I would  
> agree Marco.  Since the data we express via SW technologies will also  
> be used for "large-scale, data integration and meta-analysis on data  
> derived from disparate studies," and since to perform such studies,  
> these repositories need to be "open," I think there will be a need to  
> have this level of detail available on the web in general.  Having  said 
>

Well, my feeling is that, if in the future we will have SW supporting
the functional genomics field, the typical usage scenario could be
something like:

- Find interesting experiments, either by experimental factors (where
disease D is studied?) or by targets (where is my gene expressed?).
These kind of searches would be worthly supported by SW, which would
both easy data integration and improve search results by meanse of
inference.

- Once some experiments are found, let's look at the details about them 
and let's use the gene expression data. It should be the case that this
second step would still be done using existing repositories (GEO,
ArrayExpress, the BASE installed at the user's lab) and analysis tools.

Of course you can always think to a more tight integration of functional 
genomics data coming from different applications/repositories. But this 
is a bit different than SW and object models (+ ontology and term 
references) should be ok for that.

Well this is just my impression (and, given the performances of current
SW technologies, it's a hope too... ;-) ), opininions are welcome about...


Cheers.


-- 

===============================================================================
Marco Brandizi <brandizi@ebi.ac.uk>
http://gca.btbs.unimib.it/brandizi

Received on Sunday, 11 June 2006 22:48:24 UTC