1. Scientific Discourse Task Tim Clark Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard Medical School
W3C HCLS MIT
April 30, 2009

2. Participants
Uldis Bojars, Sean Bechhofer, John Breslin, Annamaria Carusi, Paolo Ciccarese, Tim Clark, Sudeshna Das, Tudor Groza, Christoph Lange, Scott Marshall, David Newman, Alex Passant, Eric Prud’hommeaux, Matthias Samwald, Susie Stephens, Elizabeth Wu, (and several others…)

3. What do these diseases have in common?
Alzheimer Disease
Huntington’s Disease
Nicotine Addiction
Schizophrenia
Bipolar Disorder
Autism
Parkinson’s Disease
ALS
Neuropathic Pain
Major Depressive Disorder
Cancer (multiple forms)

4. Answer: Highly complex disorders
Much information, incomplete understanding
Inadequate treatment options
Huge cost in human suffering
Multi-factorial causality
Require multi-disciplinary collaboration for progress to understanding and cure
Productive disagreement drives research

5. Total annual cost = $895.2 billion

6. ? ?

7. What is the underlying biology?
Research Questions
What is the underlying biology?
How can we intervene therapeutically?

8. share interpretations
create hypothesis
design experiment
run experiment
collect data
interpret data
share interpretations
synthesize knowledge

9. Scientific knowledge ecosystem
run experiment
collect data
design experiment
interpret data
synthesize knowledge
share interpretations
create hypothesis
Scientific knowledge ecosystem

10. Scientific Discourse Task
Coalesce discourse ontologies
SWAN + SIOC (+SALT?)
Use in real applications (e.g. SCF/Drupal)
Map over the research lifecycle
Hypothesis, experiment, data
Interpretation, publication, search
Map with BioRDF, LODD & other tasks

11. Scientific Discourse Task Status April 30 2009
SWAN + SIOC Integration
Done. IG Note in progress.
Discourse + myExperiment
Basic approach worked out.
Discourse + Terminology
Lightweight terminology bridging approach developed & to be presented at breakout.

12. Scientific Discourse Task Going forward
Discourse + myExperiment
Path to packaging data with pubs.
Discourse + Terminology
Path to agile development & support of scientific goals & legacy terminologies
Discourse + Annotation
Extensions to support annotation provenance & localization
Discourse & web communities
Jump into the primordial soup! :-)