The Semantic Web and Health Care / Life Sciences
Eric
Miller
W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
W3C HCLSIG F2F
Cambridge, MA 2006-01-25
Slides
are available at
http://www.w3.org/2006/Talks/0125-hclsig-em/
Semantic Web - Many things to many people
The World Wide Web Consortium
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International consortium directed by Tim Berners-Lee
- Mission: "Lead the Web to its full potential"
- Hosts: MIT, ERCIM, Keio University
- Defines Web standards: HTML, XML, Web Services, Semantic Web
- W3C track record: building infrastructure to address
technical and social needs of the Web
Semantic Web
Data Integration at Web Scale
Enabling a Web of Data
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Framework to facilitate integration
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Capability of connecting data it to its definitions and
context
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E.G. not just "color" but a concept denoted by a Web
identifier:
<http://pantone.tm.example.com/2002/std6#color>
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Functionality to draw new conclusions
Semantic Web Goal
Enabling more effective collaboration and reuse of data at
various scales
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Personal, group, organization, community, web
Reducing the technical and social costs for effective
integration of networked data
Moving from a Web of Document to a
Web of Data
What is a Web of Data?
Thinking back a bit... circa 1993
FTP, Gopher and Archie: popular for sharing resources
on the Internet
Stopped at the file level
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What is a Web of Data? - Continued
Thinking back a bit... circa 1994
HTML and URIs
Markup language and means for connecting resources
Below the file level
Stopped at the text level
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A Web of Data
XML, RDF, OWL and URIs
Markup language and means for connecting resources
Below the file, text level
At the data level
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Joining the Web: Data in RDF and OWL ...
...merges just like that.
Enabling technologies
- URI - decentralized identifiers
- XML - common syntax
- RDF - common data model; grounded in the web
- RDFS - primitives for declaring classes, properties; limited logical inference
- OWL - contraints, equivalence, etc.; richer logical inferences
See Also: Ivan Herman's tutorial for details regarding these specifications
Legos as Data Building Blocks ...
... enabling many things
Wrapping, Enhancing the Existing Web
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Web Evolution not Revolution
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Exposing data hiding in documents, servers and databases
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Machine Processible data on the Web
Semantic Web Technologies
Semantic Web Standards
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Open standards, commercial and open source and tools -
technologies for modeling real world things; sharing
these models across the Web.
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Focus is on Web Evolution
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Web Evolution causing a quiet data revolution
Changing views in the marketplace
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Things change, plan up front for it
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Desire to free data from the application that
created it
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More flexible, customized information services /
products
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The value in "as needed" data integration
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Big wins come from many little ones
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The power of links - network effect
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Open-world, open solutions are cost effective
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Importance of "Partial Understanding"
Space and Time connect many things
Problem
Health Services integration problem in Rhode Island:
- Food pantries on one site
- Shelters on another
- Homeless meal sites
- Health Services locations
What makes it possible? Piggy Bank
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Personal and collaborative information management
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Facilitate the management, combination of data and services
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- Solvent: Interactive Tool for helping exract data from particular web site
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Vodafone - Live Mobile Portal
Search application (e.g. ringtone, game, picture)
using RDF
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better search : page views per download decreased
50%
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increased revenue : ringtone up 20% in 2 months
Bringing goods closer to customers increased sales
RDF was key factor in making this possible
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Nokia - Semantic Web enabled forum.nokia.com
FOAF Friend of a Friend
Creating a Web of machine-readable homepages describing
people, the links between them and the things they create and
do
FOAF Vocabulary
Specification
<foaf:Person rdf:about="http://www.w3.org/People/EM/contact#me">
<foaf:name>Eric Miller</foaf:name>
<foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:em@w3.org" />
<foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/People/EM/" />
<foaf:img rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/People/EM/s00782" />
<foaf:knows rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i" />
</foaf:Person>
Navigating : Foafnaut
Distributed RDF/XML records describing people, who they
know, projects they work on, etc.
Web interface for displaying complex data
Benefits of SVG, SMIL, RDF integration
Open source collaboration (
credits)
Example of RDF network effect combining FOAF and RDF
image co-depiction
( demo)
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Lots of commercial products
For the business analyst
- Adobe's XMP, Altova's SemanticWorks, Oracle's 10.2, Cerbra Server,
RDF Gateway and InferEd, Aduna's Metadata Server, Northrop
Grumman's Tucana Suite, Siderean's Seamark Navigator,
Profium's Semantic Information Router (SIR), Teranode's XDA,
Language and Computing's LinKFactory, etc.
See the Semantic Web list of Commercial applications for more
Lots of demos and applications
For those interested in learning more
- Partners Healthcare Systems on 'Clinical Knowledge Management' - Tonya, Vipul
- Agfa on 'Connected Knowledge' - Helen, Jos
- Active Semantic Electronic Medical Record, an application of Active Semantic Documents in health care - Amit
- BioDash using Haystack - Dennis, Eric
- Language & Computing's Knowledge Discovery Platform accelerates drug development through knowledge extraction and semantic integration - Davide
Also, The Semantic Web Best Practice and Deployment working group maintains a list
of additional Semantic Web applications and demos.
HCLS
- Share use cases, applications, demonstrations, experiences
- Exposing collections
- Developing vocabularies
- Building / extending (where appropriate) core vocabularies for data integration
GRDDL
Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages
A mechanism for connecting XHTML (e.g. microformats)
and XML dialects with the Semantic Web.
1. Pick a way of expressing data in XHTML, and get an XSLT
transformation to RDF; for example:
GRDDL 2
2. Make links from your XHTML data to the transformation,
using the
transformation
link type:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head profile="http://www.w3.org/2003/g/data-view">
<title>Some Document</title>
<link rel="transformation"
href="http://www.w3.org/2000/06/dc-extract/dc-extract.xsl" />
<meta name="DC.Subject"
content="ADAM; Simple Search; Index+; prototype" />
...
</head>
...
</html>
GRDDL 3
3. Reference the GRDDL profile to make it clear what that
transformation link type means:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head profile="http://www.w3.org/2003/g/data-view">
<title>Some Document</title>
...
GRDDL XSLT service demo, example
SPARQL
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Query language for RDF
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Common protocol and interface to expose databases /
application data as RDF
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"Join the Web"
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More information:
Data
Access working group
SKOS
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Simple Knowledge Organization System
(SKOS)
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RDF vocabulary to support the declaration / reuse of
knowledge organization systems (KOS)
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Core
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model for expressing the basic structure and content
of concept schemes (thesauri, classification schemes,
subject heading lists, taxonomies, etc.)
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Work on Mapping and Extensions
Conclusions
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Semantic Web is here
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More work is needed
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You can help!
More Information
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Slides
are available at
http://www.w3.org/2006/Talks/1125-hclsig-em/
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W3C - http://www.w3.org/
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Semantic Web Home
Page - http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
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Me - Eric
Miller, em@w3.org