Meeting on shared names for biomedical information records on the Web

*Meeting on shared names for biomedical information records on the Web*

Community-wide use of shared names for records from public databases could
have a significant effect on the practice of bioinformatics by making it
easier to share and link data sets and tools across projects. While
publishing data in RDF is appealing to many organizations, the mechanics of
selecting and maintaining identifiers is a major obstacle to deployment. A
growing body of experience emphasizes that for any solution to be generally
adopted it must not only be technically sound, but also serve the practical
needs of curators and other users.

The Shared Names initiative has as its mission to assign URIs as names for
publicly available biomedical information records and establish a community
managed shared infrastructure for providing durable access to documentation
about these names, as described in a set of requirements [1]. The scope of
resources under consideration is initially limited to records in databases,
such as those mentioned in the external links (dbxrefs) from the Gene
Ontology (GO) [2], for records from Enzyme or Pfam. A proposed
implementation, to be demonstrated at the meeting, uses federated PURL
servers that provide RDF-encoded metadata that clearly specifies what the
URI denotes and that links the shared names to alternative encodings and
associated information about the records.

We plan to hold a one day working group meeting to continue to work on
technical and administrative design issues. The meeting will focus on
assessing work to date, reviewing requirements and surfacing new ones,
addressing some of the items of business listed at [3], and planning for
subsequent work.

In addition to participation by members of the steering committee [4] and a
set of invited experts, this meeting is open to a number of additional
participants. We are particularly interested in attendees who have previous
experience in designing a naming system, have novel requirements that they
wish to expose, are developers of systems that cross-reference public
biomedical records or are primary providers of them who might help
coordinate on issues such as synchronization of added and removed records
and creation/deprecation of shared names for them.

The meeting will take place on April 29, 2009, at the Stata Center in
Cambridge, MA. Expressions of interest in attending should be made by
registering, ideally, by March 23, 2009, at: http://tinyurl.com/cltlx9 with
a brief note detailing your interest and how you might contribute to the
success of the meeting. Registrations received by 23rd will result in a
confirmation of attendance sent by COB March 26, 2009. Work of the Shared
Names initiative is intended to be open source and royalty free.


Sincerely,

M. Scott Marshall, W3C HCLS Interest group
Mark Musen, National Center for Biomedical Ontology
Eric Prud'hommeaux, W3C
Jonathan Rees, Science Commons
Alan Ruttenberg, Science Commons, OBO Foundry
Trish Whetzel, National Center for Biomedical Ontology

[1] http://purl.org/shared/admin/requirements
[2] http://www.geneontology.org/cgi-bin/xrefs.cgi
[3] http://purl.org/shared/admin/meeting/2009-04-29/agenda
[4] http://purl.org/shared/admin/committee