Abstract
The Semantic Web offers an ideal platform for representing and linking biomedical information, which is a prerequisite for the development and application of analytical tools to address problems in data-intensive areas such as systems biology and translational medicine. As for any new paradigm, the adoption of the Semantic Web offers opportunities and poses questions and challenges to the life sciences scientific community: which technologies in the Semantic Web stack will be more beneficial for the life sciences? Is biomedical information too complex to benefit from simple interlinked representations? What are the implications of adopting a new paradigm for knowledge representation? What are the incentives for the adoption of the Semantic Web, and who are the facilitators? Is there going to be a Semantic Web revolution in the life sciences?We report here a few reflections on these questions, following discussions at the SWAT4LS (Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Life Sciences) workshop series, of which this Journal of Biomedical Semantics special issue presents selected papers from the 2009 edition, held in Amsterdam on November 20th.
Highlights
The increasing amounts of data being gathered on biological systems and the convergence of different disciplines are leading to entirely new areas of research, from systems biology to translational and personalized medicine
The Semantic Web offers an ideal platform for representing and linking biomedical information, which is a prerequisite for the development and application of analytical tools to address problems in data-intensive areas such as systems biology and translational medicine
Essential types of life sciences data such as those related to biomarkers, microarrays, mass spectrometry, and many types of fluorescent imaging, are still accessed from domain-specific applications that work with specialized data formats, without any support for semantics and RDF
Summary
The increasing amounts of data being gathered on biological systems and the convergence of different disciplines are leading to entirely new areas of research, from systems biology to translational and personalized medicine. The Semantic Web offers an ideal platform for representing and linking biomedical information, which is a prerequisite for the development and application of analytical tools to address problems in data-intensive areas such as systems biology and translational medicine.
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