Re: Health Care and Life Sciences SemanticWb on iPhone and iPod touch

Hi Kei,

Great to hear from you and the podcast idea is excellent. I wonder, is  
there any effort to have semantics attached to the podcasts? That'd be  
cool to have triples indicating content.

The main difficulty with making an iPhone app work with multiple  
SPARQL endpoints, from my perspective, is due to 1) differing coverage  
and content, 2) differing structures, and 3) differing URIs. Number 3  
is the easiest to deal with.

An application that goes straight to the endpoints without using a  
server to do translation, aggregation, etc. across endpoints must  
either do all of this itself (too much for an iPhone app) or get its  
full content  from the endpoint it uses.

Detailed PubMed information, for instance, is a very important feature  
to scientists. Only the Bio2RDF endpoints provide details including  
abstracts in RDF. All endpoints seem to have the authors associated  
with a particular paper but a big limitation of every endpoint is that  
it is impossible to reconstruct the order of the authors. (At least I  
haven't found a way.)

Don

On Dec 17, 2009, at 3:26 PM, Kei Cheung wrote:

> Hi Don,
>
> Donald Doherty wrote:
>> Scott Marshall suggested that people on the HCLS list would have  
>> fun with my SemanticWb iPhone and iPod touch app (www.actionpotential.com 
>> ).
>
> Mobile neuroscience sounds an interesting concept. You may also want  
> to use it to play the neuroscience podcasts of interest.
>>
>> It's one of many technologies I play around with to test the  
>> potential (and current limits) of the Semantic Web and Semantic Web  
>> technologies (for instance, see my site using MIT Simile technology  
>> at www.historicshadyside.org).
>>
>> Currently SemanticWb is using Bio2RDF endpoints. I'm working to  
>> make it possible for the user to select from a number of SPARQL  
>> endpoints but it's unfortunately non-trivial.
> Is it because of the bandwidth issue? I think it'd be nice if it can  
> also access other endpoints like the HCLS KB's. That reminds me that  
> Scott had mentioned to me recently that the HCLS KB endpoint at  
> Berlin could not be accessible. I wonder if it has been fixed yet.
>
> Cheers,
>
> -Kei
>>
>> Enjoy! And I'll be happy to talk about lessons learned.
>>
>> Donald Doherty, Ph.D.
>> donald.doherty@actionpotential.com
>>
>>
>
>

Received on Thursday, 17 December 2009 20:45:13 UTC