Carole Goble discusses the impact of semantic technologies on the life sciences

Abstract

Carole Goble is Professor in the Department of Computer Science in the University of Manchester, from where she graduated. Her research interests are centred on the accessibility of information, primarily through the use of ontologies for the representation and classification of metadata. She works in many application areas, and in particular Life Sciences. The Information Management Group that she co-leads is renowned for its work on ontology languages (OIL, DAML+OIL, OWL), reasoning systems (FaCT) and their practical application to real problems. Her work on the application of ontologies to biology and bioinformatics has been particularly influential. She currently has a leading role in two major international initiatives: the Semantic Web and the Grid. She has combined these into the Semantic Grid, co-chairing the Semantic Grid Research Group in the Global Grid Forum standards organisation and directing a major UK BioGrid research pilot, myGrid. She chaired the first Semantic Web track of the World Wide Web Conference in 2002. She serves on many boards and programme committees including the OntoWeb Thematic Network executive management board, the international Semantic Web Science Association and the EU/NSF joint ad hoc committee Semantic Web Services Initiative. She is an Editor-in-Chief of the new Elsevier journal Journal of Web Semantics and is co-founder of a start-up company, Network Inference, specialising in technologies for the Semantic Web.