3M has opened up the 3M Healthcare Data Dictionary under an agreement with the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs. According to the article, “The 3M Healthcare Data Dictionary will provide the core technology to enable semantic interoperability for the joint DoD/VA integrated Electronic Health Record (iEHR), making it possible to share medical knowledge and secure patient data between care providers at U.S. military treatment facilities located around the world and VA Medical Centers. Access to actionable clinical information whenever and wherever care is delivered will enable safer, better coordinated, and higher quality care for the country’s 32 million veterans, active service members, and their families.” Read more

SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

Janna Hastings recently reported that ontologies have become an essential component of life science research. She writes, “Ontology has become the method of choice throughout most of biology and biomedicine for constructing and maintaining standardisations of the terminology used in database annotations.  This was the primary motivation for the development of the Gene Ontology, and remains until today a pressing and urgent requirement throughout computer-assisted science in many different fields.  This is thus the first application of bio-ontology in data-driven science.” Read more

These days, it’s not just the traditional publishing community that has reason for leveraging the content syndication model. As more and more companies across vertical sectors themselves become content providers, syndication makes sense for them, too.

NewsCred has a new – and semantic – take on content syndication, with content partners ranging from Reuters to The Guardian to The Economist. Recently-added customers that leverage the service’s fully licensed text, image and video content include traditional publishers such as the New York Daily News (and NewsCred is in talks with it about becoming a content provider, too). But other recent customers point to the importance of quality content to the consumer and corporate brand market:  For example, insurance provider Zurich recently signed on. NewsCred also just closed a deal with Johnson & Johnson to be a subscriber of its syndication services for content related to the health care products and pharmaceuticals space.

Brands, says NewsCred CEO Shafqat Islam, are responding to consumers getting smarter and more demanding. “They have so much access to information that brands are starting to realize they can’t just sell products or services anymore,” he says. “They need more authentic, engaging conversations with their customers and the best way to build these authentic relationships is with highly-engaging, trusted, high-quality content.”

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Cambridge Semantics’ new Competitive Intelligence Solution has been named Best in Show at the 2012 BioIT World Conference. The company reports, “Based on the flagship Anzo Software Suite, the Cambridge Semantics Competitive Intelligence Solution was recognized for its unique approach to helping biopharma companies handle their diverse and ever-changing information needs.” Read more

The PROOF (Prevention of Organ Failure) Centre at St. Paul’s Hospital, hosted by the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, is one of those leading-edge research organizations aiming to move us a little closer to the world of precision medicine, with the help of semantic technology. In the process, it also hopes to have a positive impact on the high costs of health care.

That’s a problem not just in the U.S., but also in Canada where provincial governments bear the burden of rising health care costs, which make up 45 percent of the budget for British Columbia alone.

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A new paper is available for purchase entitled Semantic Web meets Integrative Biology: A Survey. The paper was written by Huajun Chen, Tong Yu, and Jake Y. Chen. According to the abstract, “Integrative Biology (IB) uses experimental or computational quantitative technologies to characterize biological systems at the molecular, cellular, tissue and population levels. IB typically involves the integration of the data, knowledge and capabilities across disciplinary boundaries in order to solve complex problems.” Read more

Brian Voytek recently wrote an article regarding the increasingly plausible concept of automated science made possible by Big Data. Voytek writes, “A lot of great pieces have been written about the relatively recent surge in interest in big data and data science, but in this piece I want to address the importance of deep data analysis: what we can learn from the statistical outliers by drilling down and asking, ‘What’s different here? What’s special about these outliers and what do they tell us about our models and assumptions?’” Read more

How to help the bench biologist get value out of the wealth of life sciences Linked Data sets? Startup Metaome Science Informatics proposes to offer some help with its DistilBio semantic search and data integration technology, by streamlining the approach to posing user queries. The Distil in DistilBio stands for Data Integration using Semantic Technologies in the Life Sciences.

Metaome, which was founded by CEO Kalpana Krishnaswami and CTO Ramkumar Nandakumar as a bioinformatics services provider before transitioning to a product vendor, contains a few more than a dozen life sciences public data sets so far. Infomaticians in the life sciences space have the expertise to query such data across sets via SPARQL, but the front-line biologist isn’t necessarily an infomatician. So, DistilBio has created a query interface that makes it easier for them to ask large and complex questions in a simplified way across data sets while building a graph in the process.

“How does a user say what are the drugs used for Alzheimer’s disease and do have they have certain protein targets and are those protein targets implicated in other diseases?” says Krishnaswami. “To ask that in one shot right now is hard without working through a SPARQL endpoint using all the SPARQL syntax.”

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Richard Van Noorden of nature.com recently reported that though text mining and semantic search have increased useful connections between research, publishers of that research are wary about their rights being infringed upon. He writes, “When he was a keen young biology graduate student in 2006, Max Haeussler wrote a computer program that would scan, or ‘crawl’, plain text and pull out any DNA sequences. To test his invention, the naive text-miner downloaded around 20,000 research papers that his institution had paid to access — and promptly found his IP address blocked by the papers’ publisher. It was not until 2009 that Haeussler, then at the University of Manchester, UK, and now at the University of California, Santa Cruz, returned to the project in earnest. He had come to realize that standard site licences do not permit systematic downloads, because publishers fear wholesale theft of their content.” Read more

At the recent SemTech Berlin conference, husband-and-wife team Michael Trevor McDonald and Kim Chandler McDonald, CTO and Executive VP, respectively, of KimmiC, led a session that discussed a marriage of a different sort: that between the Semantic Web and the user interface.  The session was described as providing the audience insight into the benefits of the semantic web, given that so much of the world’s economic brain/ecosystem is tied up in the relationships between companies, consumers and suppliers – an interaction between systems and people that is a real-life ‘Matrix’ whose ubiquity is hampered by the lack of a common way of talking about things such that they can be utilized and shared simply, and in a confidential, secure, and vendor-neutral manner.

The Semantic Web Blog had an opportunity to have an email discussion with the Australian-based minds behind KimmiC, and its FlatWorld cloud-based technology for enabling the global, digital economy, to learn more about the SemWeb/UI marriage.

Semantic Web Blog: Help us better understand this idea of The Matrix in the context described – considering the movie, is that a positive analogy and what does the Semantic Web have to do with it?

Michael: I think we can use the analogy pretty well as is. What we have seen in the market is essentially a few large companies trying to subvert the intent of the web into a controlled matrix (controlled by them) that they can exploit – it is, in fact, the cornerstone of their business models.

We view that consumers, once they become more aware of it, will see themselves as a “knowledge/insight” commodity in that they a) control their information and b) control who, when and where (what part) companies/friends/family etc. have access to them – it is most probably the next big frontier.

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