Hi,
Although I have been on this list for a while and been working or collaborating with someone on the list too, I have never formally introduced myself. I think it might be a good idea to post some details about what my research group and I are interested in and what we wish to contribute to the group.
I am a postdoc researcher from the Image Bioinformatics Research Group of the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford. After obtaining a Ph.D. degree in computer science in 2007 and working together with bioinformaticians for almost four years, I decided to continue devoting myself to the bridging between computer science and biomedical research by embedding in a biological research department for my postdoctoral research.
My research group and I are interested in using Semantic Web standards and protocols (such as RDF, URI, SPARQL) to support the management and analysis of biomedical research data on a large scale. I am particularly interested in exploring the publication and integration of various genomics, proteomics, and medicine data resources as Linked Open Datasets on the Web, in order to obtain insights of what can or cannot be done with the current SW tools, technologies and standards.
I am currently working in the FlyWeb (http://imageweb.zoo.ox.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/FlyWeb_project) project in Oxford, which aims to support Drosophila (fruit flies) genomic research by linking together distributed Drosophila data resources, including the gene expression images of embryos from Berkley Drosophila Genome Project (BDGP, http://www.fruitfly.org/), the gene expression images of testis from FlyTED (the Drosophila Testis Gene Expression Image Database from Oxford, http://www.flyted.org), the genomic information resources from FlyBase (http://www.flybase.org), and relevant publications about Drosophila genes and human infertility studies from PubMed and other publication repositories. By now, we have achieved in demonstrating the integration of three Drosophila databases: FlyBase, the BDGP, and the FlyTED Database, to provide an overview of spatial patterns of gene expression across different organs. The first release of this application is planned to be published by October.
I am also working on exploring the representation of a semantic network between scientific publications that is formed by the research data and their relationships reported in the publications or the types of citation relationships between papers (e.g., supports, disagrees, comments, extends). There seems to be some overlapping with the Scientific Discourse (SWN+SIOC) activity in HCLS.
My research group and I hope to contribute more concrete use cases to this interest group, with our unique position in a biological research department and close collaboration with biologist researchers for building semantic web applications,
With best regards, Jun -- Dr. Jun Zhao Image Bioinformatics Research Group Department of Zoology, University of Oxford South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Direct phone: +44-(0)1865-281094 Department fax: +44-(0)1865-310447
