HCLS blog

It occurred to me that many people don't read blogs. So, to bring an HCLS
blog to your attention:

http://www.w3.org/blog/hcls/2011/04/01/semantic_web_japan_personalized_medicine

I recently had the good fortune of being invited to give a keynote at
the Japanese
Semantic Web conference <http://s-web.sfc.keio.ac.jp/conference2011/>, held
at Keio University in beautiful city of Tokyo, Japan. The speaker before me,
Tetsuro Toyoda, described how Semantic Web was being used at RIKEN
<http://www.base.riken.jp/english/>(The
Institute of Physical and Chemical Research). Many of these interesting
activities can be found at RIKEN database <http://database.riken.jp/>, such
as Semantic-JSON<https://database.riken.jp/sw/links/en/cria160s1ria160s5i/#concept>
 and Semantic Table <http://semantictable.org/>. There was a healthy showing
of commercial interest present at the conference, as well as a demonstration
of a (Japanese) medical terminology system that made use of OWL and could
provide English translations. I wish our Japanese colleagues a quick
recovery from the recent earthquake and tsunami. Although Tokyo was not hit
as hard as other areas, it has still been severely affected, with power
blackouts causing many delays in a return to normality.

After Tokyo, I traveled to beautiful city of Vancouver to speak at the Best
Practices in Personalized Medicine
Workshop<http://www.b2pm.org/B2PM_Conference/Agenda.html>,
which was held as part of theHeart + Lung Research & Education
FEST<http://fest.heartandlung.ca/>.
The Semantic Web session where I spoke also had nicely complimentary talks
from Xavier Lopez (Oracle) and Mark Wilkinson (UBC). At B2PM, Leroy Hood
opened with a keynote expanding on P4 - his description of a new approach to
medicine <http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/24703/?a=f> that is
"powerfully predictive, personalized, preventative -- meaning we'll shift
the focus to wellness -- and participatory" and described recent progress.
B2PM attendees presented and discussed how to achieve the goals of
personalized medicine. Many participants have expressed interest in making
use of the established network to further the cause of personalized
medicine.

I have been learning about the Sentient Knowledge Explorer from IO
Informatics <http://io-informatics.com/>. Knowledge Explorer has some very
useful features and functionality that includes the generation of SPARQL
queries from user selected
sub-networks<http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/IOInformatics/figure4.png>
without
requiring knowledge of SPARQL. A full description can be found at the W3C
use case description "Case Study: Applied Semantic Knowledgebase for
Detection of Patients at Risk of Organ Failure through Immune
Rejection"<http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/IOInformatics/>
.

Cheers,

Scott
--
M. Scott Marshall, W3C HCLS IG co-chair, http://www.w3.org/blog/hcls
http://staff.science.uva.nl/~marshall