Carl Reynolds of the Open Knowledge Foundation reports, “Last week saw the launch of prescribinganalytics.com (covered in the Economist and elsewhere). At present it’s ‘just’ a nice data visualisation of some interesting open data that show the NHS could potentially save millions from its drug budget. I say ‘just’ because we’re in discussions with several NHS organizations about providing a richer, tailored, prescribing analytics service to support the best use of NHS drug budgets. Working on the project was a lot of fun, and to my mind the work nicely shows the spectacular value of open data when combined with people and internet.” Read more

This video lecture discusses the development of OpenTox, an open source predictive toxicology framework. The description states, “A new paradigm of 21st century human-oriented safety testing approaches is now emerging based on a combination of in silico and in vitro approaches. The new predictive test systems developed from this growing ‘grand challenge’ effort will need to combine evidences from a great variety of data, protocols, and concepts. The combination of these sources of knowledge within an ontology-based mechanistic knowledge-oriented framework to produce reliable test systems demands the development of a semantic web for toxicology.” Read more