I'm very excited about the vision described in the Knowledge Cycle task force. It's my believe that the semantic web technologies will eventually empower individual researchers to share and exchange research information in new way that was not possible before. I would like to propose a specific task that could be implemented in a short period of time.
Proposed task: Distributed self-publishing of experiments
Deliverables:
- Ontology for publishing projects and experiments. There are some domain-specific ontologies, such as microarray experiment ontology, already existed today. This task is intended to develop a general purpose ontology for describing projects and experiments in such a way that search and comparison of components of experiments is possible.
- A test data set that built from publicly available experiment information. Ideally, if we can get a dozen labs to participate in, we can also include real time experiment information from distributed sources.
- A demo server for aggregating experiments from distributed sources (i.e. research labs) that have their experiments published in RDF format using the ontology developed by this task.
- A semantic search engine for searching and comparing projects and experiments.
Use cases:
- Any individual researcher can publish his or her project and experiment in RDF format. Because data in such format can be searched by semantic web search engine, it offers a new channel for data sharing that will accelerate scientific discovery as well as increase researchers' visibility.
- Anyone can search for projects and experiments at various property levels. Compared to traditional literature search, this semantic search engine will provide much more relevant information.
Requirements: The task requires at least one person
experienced in designing/developing ontology and one person to implement the
RDF data store and search engine. I would be interested in doing
implementation.
Welcome any comments.
AJ Chen, PhD
Bioinformatics Software Developer
