1. Harnessing the Semantic Web to Answer Scientific Questions:
A Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group demo

2. Agenda Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group
Scientific Use Case
Technological Approach
Demo
Benefits of the Semantic web

3. Health Care & Life Sciences Interest Group
HCLSIG is chartered to develop and support the use of Semantic Web technologies and practices to improve collaboration, research and development, and innovation adoption in the of Health Care and Life Science domains
More details on HCLS are available at:

4. Scientific Use Case Use case focuses on Alzheimer’s Disease (AD)
AD is a devastating illness that impacts x million people worldwide
Incidence of AD is increasing at x %
Many different and conflicting hypotheses about AD
The demo evaluates competing hypotheses using publicly available scientific data

5. Picture of linked data sets goes here…
Scientific Data Sets
Integration and analysis of x heterogeneous data sets
Hypothesis, Genome, Pathways, Disease, etc.
Picture of linked data sets goes here…

6. Technological Approach
Convert data to RDF and manage in triple store
Maintain data in original data store and map to RDF
All bio-entities were assigned URIs
Careful modeling to integrate data sources
Query data with SPARQL and x

7. AD Hypotheses
The scientific hypotheses that we explored were:
xxx

8. Benefits of the Semantic Web
Integration of heterogeneous data
Annotation of data
Hierarchical data representation
Easier re-use / recombination of data
Machine processable approach
Enables advanced inferencing
Inconsistencies can be identified

9. Conclusions
Semantic Web provides ability to query across many disparate data sources to discover new insights
Identifies patterns and insights across many data sources - no longer possible with brain power alone
Data needs to be carefully modeled - It’s not magic!
Flexible re-use of data, which is important in a discipline where knowledge is frequently updated