Announcement: Life Science SIG at ISWC

Life Science SIG
Co-located with ISWC 2009 8AM-12pm October 26, 2009     Washingtonian III
room              Westfields Conference Center near Washington, DC.

Organizers:   Eric Neumann (ClnicalSemanticsGroup),   Ted Slater
(Boehringer-Ingelheim)

*Objective*

A special interest group is being organized to bring together
thought-leaders in Semantic Web (SW) with mainstream life science (LS)
researchers. Many have heard about the SW, but very few can point to how
specifically it could impact bioinformatic analyses and genomics research.
This SIG will have a few presentations by a panel illustrating some areas of
potential benefit, followed by open discussions. Specific goals of this SIG
include:

   1. **Discussion of available resources, activities, and communities
   (e.g., HCLS) implementing SW-based solutions
   2. **Building awareness of practices using Linked Data (LD) principles
   3. **Ways to bring more LS communities together with SW activities
   4. **Identifying grand challenges in biomedical research that could be
   addressed by SW and LD principles

*Topics*

We intend to focus on the following topics that should help scientists
explore possibilities and collaborate with SW experts:

   - Semantic Web Life Sciences tools,  e.g. Cytoscape-S*QL, Exhibit/Wibbit
   - Available Linked Data (RDF) Sets , e.g., HCLS Knowledge bases, LODD
   - How life science researchers can get their feet wet with SW (on-line
   tutorials)
   - What role can NIH,NSF, and NIST play with this community?
   - HC and LS communities and activities, ontologies development, BioRDF
   - New Linked Open Bioinformatics initiative (LOBix)

*Possible Post ISWC Activities (to be discussed)*

   1. **HCLSIG community activities
   2. **LOBix coordinated projects (ISCB)
   3. **Creation of a common tool LS resource; e.g. CytoScape SPARQL,
   applications of SW with BioPAX data
   4. **Open Linked Data -  http://linkeddata.org/