introduction of Jun Zhao

Hi,

Although I have been on this list for a while and been working or 
collaborating with someone on the list too, I have never formally 
introduced myself. I think it might be a good idea to post some details 
about what my research group and I are interested in and what we wish to 
contribute to the group.

I am a postdoc researcher from the Image Bioinformatics Research Group 
of the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford. After 
obtaining a Ph.D. degree in computer science in 2007 and working 
together with bioinformaticians for almost four years, I decided to 
continue devoting myself to the bridging between computer science and 
biomedical research by embedding in a biological research department for 
my postdoctoral research.

My research group and I are interested in using Semantic Web standards 
and protocols (such as RDF, URI, SPARQL) to support the management and 
analysis of biomedical research data on a large scale. I am particularly 
interested in exploring the publication and integration of various 
genomics, proteomics, and medicine data resources as Linked Open 
Datasets on the Web, in order to obtain insights of what can or cannot 
be done with the current SW tools, technologies and standards.

I am currently working in the FlyWeb 
(http://imageweb.zoo.ox.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/FlyWeb_project) project in 
Oxford, which aims to support Drosophila (fruit flies) genomic research 
by linking together distributed Drosophila data resources, including the 
gene expression images of embryos from Berkley Drosophila Genome Project 
(BDGP, http://www.fruitfly.org/), the gene expression images of testis 
from FlyTED (the Drosophila Testis Gene Expression Image Database from 
Oxford, http://www.flyted.org), the genomic information resources from 
FlyBase (http://www.flybase.org), and relevant publications about 
Drosophila genes and human infertility studies from PubMed and other 
publication repositories. By now, we have achieved in demonstrating the 
integration of three Drosophila databases: FlyBase, the BDGP, and the 
FlyTED Database, to provide an overview of spatial patterns of gene 
expression across different organs. The first release of this 
application is planned to be published by October.

I am also working on exploring the representation of a semantic network 
between scientific publications that is formed by the research data and 
their relationships reported in the publications or the types of 
citation relationships between papers (e.g., supports, disagrees, 
comments, extends). There seems to be some overlapping with the 
Scientific Discourse (SWN+SIOC) activity in HCLS.

My research group and I hope to contribute more concrete use cases to 
this interest group, with our unique position in a biological research 
department and close collaboration with biologist researchers for 
building semantic web applications,

With best regards,

Jun

-- 
Dr. Jun Zhao
Image Bioinformatics Research Group

Department of Zoology, University of Oxford
South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK
E-mail: jun.zhao@zoo.ox.ac.uk
Direct phone: +44-(0)1865-281094
Department fax: +44-(0)1865-310447

Received on Tuesday, 30 September 2008 14:26:42 UTC