This is part of our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series. The market we are currently focused on is Healthcare. In Part 1 we looked at the big picture. In Part 2 we drilled into consumer health sites that are leveraging semantic web technology.

In this post, Part 3, we look at innovation in the enterprise space, how semantic web technology is being used by researchers in pharma and biotech firms

In the final Part 4, we will look at how all the participants in the “health graph” can start to work around a common set of data standards in what may be the first glimpse of 21st century healthcare.

Bio/Pharma may be the first enterprise software market where semantic web technology breaks into the mainstream. So this is interesting as a pointer to what will be the final 10th market in our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series – enterprise software.

This is part of our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series. The market we are currently focused on is Healthcare. In Part 1 we looked at the big picture. In Part 2 we drilled into consumer health sites that are leveraging semantic web technology.

In this post, Part 3, we look at innovation in the enterprise space, how semantic web technology is being used by researchers in pharma and biotech firms

In the final Part 4, we will look at how all the participants in the “health graph” can start to work around a common set of data standards in what may be the first glimpse of 21st century healthcare.

Bio/Pharma may be the first enterprise software market where semantic web technology breaks into the mainstream. So this is interesting as a pointer to what will be the final 10th market in our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series – enterprise software.

Open Innovation & Data Requirements For Clinical Trials

Enterprise no longer means just “inside the enterprise”. There are two big changes impacting Bio/Pharma:

1. Open Innovation. This means sourcing R&D from outside the company, usually via acquisition or licensing but sometimes from new networks that issue “challenges” to scientists for prizes. This requires data standards to enable rapid data integration. It is no good if the acquired R&D team describes a protein in a different way.

2. Data Requirements For Clinical Trials. Regulators, such as the FDA have tough standards for clinical trials for obvious reasons – lives are at stake. Increasingly, the standards call for audit trails all the way “from bench to bedside” (from scientist to patient in other words). This means that all the different departments, regulators and partners have to look at data in the same way.

The key point is that standards that are adopted WITHIN one enterprise are not much use. Standards have to be industry-wide, applicable across any enterprise within the BioPharma business.

That is what Bio RDF is designed to do.

Bio RDF

Bio RDF is a W3C supported standard that is described here:

“With the advent of high-throughput experimentation, there has been an explosion of biomedical data on the Internet. While most of the data is available in Web accessible formats (e.g. HTML), many biomedical researchers rely on the use of Web browsers (e.g., Firefox and Internet Explorer) and search engines like Google to browse and search data on the Internet. Such manual browsing and keyword searching approaches are inadequate for large-scale integration of data on the Web. The Semantic Web transforms the Web into a global database or knowledge base that can be accessed by computer programs/agents through a standard data/ontology format. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) are the W3C standards for encoding data/knowledge. This task group explores how to use RDF and OWL (as well as their enabling technologies) to better enable the computer to represent, identify, publish, query and integrate data/knowledge in the health care and life science domain.”

Despite the name, Bio RDF is as much about OWL as it is about RDF. As we learned from talking to IBM, Bio/Pharma is one market where ontologies are critical and plentiful.

Bio RDF is being applied two major healthcare knowledge bases.
- One is at DERI, stored in Virtuoso with around 419 million RDF statements.

- Two is at Freie Universität Berlin stored in AlegoGraph.

The beauty of Semantic Web is that the location of the data and what triple store is used is totally irrelevant – we describe that here merely as a kind of historical footnote!

Bio RDF has been incubated within the academic and scientific community as one can see from these participants:

But it is the participation of large Pharma companies, represented by Susie Stephens of Johnson & Johnson that represents the interesting adoption by enterprises.

The Big Enterprise Data Guys: Oracle & IBM

BioPharma are facing “ye olde data integration challenge”. Their need to acquire R&D via open innovation and for workflow from “bench to bedside” ratchets that need to the next level. But at a high level, this is a data integration challenge that enterprises have wrestled with for decades.

The enterprise software market has come up with a dizzying array of solutions to this problem: data warehouse, enterprise application integration, model driven architecture, service oriented architecture to name just a few of the most popular. Semantic Web technology is another approach to this data integration problem, something that we will explore further in the final market in this Creative Destruction series when we look at Enterprise Software.

When large companies such as Eli Lilly start using semantic web technology in the way shown on this case study slide, the big enterprise vendors such as Oracle and IBM pay attention.

Mainstream adoption within the enterprise depends on the support of big vendors. They legitimize a new technology and make adoption “safe”. This also makes the market better for startups.

We are seeing this in the BioPharma space. Pressure from large clients for example makes Oracle support standards such as RDF. That will then lead into other markets.

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CONVERT BREAKS: __default__

Open Innovation & Data Requirements For Clinical Trials

Enterprise no longer means just “inside the enterprise”. There are two big changes impacting Bio/Pharma:

1. Open Innovation. This means sourcing R&D from outside the company, usually via acquisition or licensing but sometimes from new networks that issue “challenges” to scientists for prizes. This requires data standards to enable rapid data integration. It is no good if the acquired R&D team describes a protein in a different way.

2. Data Requirements For Clinical Trials. Regulators, such as the FDA have tough standards for clinical trials for obvious reasons – lives are at stake. Increasingly, the standards call for audit trails all the way “from bench to bedside” (from scientist to patient in other words). This means that all the different departments, regulators and partners have to look at data in the same way.

The key point is that standards that are adopted WITHIN one enterprise are not much use. Standards have to be industry-wide, applicable across any enterprise within the BioPharma business.

That is what Bio RDF is designed to do.

Bio RDF

Bio RDF is a W3C supported standard that is described here:

“With the advent of high-throughput experimentation, there has been an explosion of biomedical data on the Internet. While most of the data is available in Web accessible formats (e.g. HTML), many biomedical researchers rely on the use of Web browsers (e.g., Firefox and Internet Explorer) and search engines like Google to browse and search data on the Internet. Such manual browsing and keyword searching approaches are inadequate for large-scale integration of data on the Web. The Semantic Web transforms the Web into a global database or knowledge base that can be accessed by computer programs/agents through a standard data/ontology format. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) are the W3C standards for encoding data/knowledge. This task group explores how to use RDF and OWL (as well as their enabling technologies) to better enable the computer to represent, identify, publish, query and integrate data/knowledge in the health care and life science domain.”

Despite the name, Bio RDF is as much about OWL as it is about RDF. As we learned from talking to IBM, Bio/Pharma is one market where ontologies are critical and plentiful.

Bio RDF is being applied two major healthcare knowledge bases.
- One is at DERI, stored in Virtuoso with around 419 million RDF statements.

- Two is at Freie Universität Berlin stored in AlegoGraph.

The beauty of Semantic Web is that the location of the data and what triple store is used is totally irrelevant – we describe that here merely as a kind of historical footnote!

Bio RDF has been incubated within the academic and scientific community as one can see from these participants:

But it is the participation of large Pharma companies, represented by Susie Stephens of Johnson & Johnson that represents the interesting adoption by enterprises.

The Big Enterprise Data Guys: Oracle & IBM

BioPharma are facing “ye olde data integration challenge”. Their need to acquire R&D via open innovation and for workflow from “bench to bedside” ratchets that need to the next level. But at a high level, this is a data integration challenge that enterprises have wrestled with for decades.

The enterprise software market has come up with a dizzying array of solutions to this problem: data warehouse, enterprise application integration, model driven architecture, service oriented architecture to name just a few of the most popular. Semantic Web technology is another approach to this data integration problem, something that we will explore further in the final market in this Creative Destruction series when we look at Enterprise Software.

When large companies such as Eli Lilly start using semantic web technology in the way shown on this case study slide, the big enterprise vendors such as Oracle and IBM pay attention.

Mainstream adoption within the enterprise depends on the support of big vendors. They legitimize a new technology and make adoption “safe”. This also makes the market better for startups.

We are seeing this in the BioPharma space. Pressure from large clients for example makes Oracle support standards such as RDF. That will then lead into other markets.

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• Don’t forget to propose your startup for our Semantic Web Impact Awards. The deadline is Sept. 15.

SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

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