Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
information search, access, extraction, interpretation, processing, and sharing
between the community members. At the core of this portal is a resource
description framework (RDF) data store. Every data point on the portal is
linked to another with a relationship and this subject-predicate-object triple
forms the unit for RDF store.
The need for interoperable data has led to development of a large number
of biological databases with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) RDF
triples. Gene Ontology (GO) [5], CHEBI [6], and SNOMED (http://www.
nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/Snomed/snomed_main.html) are examples of the
most widely used ontologies in the biomedical domain (see Chapter 5). Efforts
are being made to defi ne standard ontologies. The W3C Health Care and Life
Sciences Interest Group (http://www.w3.org/blog/hcls) and Open Biomedical
Ontologies (OBO) [7] are actively defi ning common controlled vocabularies
and making them available as an RDF. The standards adopted by OSDD
conform to the standards that are being developed worldwide.
Web 2.0 tools are changing the way we communicate on the Web. Web 1.0
was about displaying information. Web 2.0 is about conversations and about
participation in the fl ow of information. Web 2.0 uses many new approaches
for dealing with information, including wikis, blogs, syndication, forums, and
mash-ups. These require and facilitate the active participation of users and have
been used to create hugely popular social media sites, such as Facebook and
YouTube. The tools of Web 2.0 are chipping away at the tightly guarded bound-
aries of scientifi c communication. The tools used by social networks enable
researchers to connect with similar projects and locate persons with similar or
complementary skills. Researchers are sharing and discussing their work on
blogs, wikis, and social networks of Web 2.0. The OSDD portal couples these
Web 2.0 tools for scientifi c collaboration to usher in science 2.0 for TB research.
20.3 DESCRIPTION OF THE PORTAL:
COLLABORATIVE WORKSPACES
The main aim of the portal is to provide a virtual framework for discussions
and data sharing along with other essential functionalities for managing and
organizing the research projects. Thus, in the OSDD portal all the components
ranging from social networking to open electronic laboratory notebooks and
project management utilities are coupled to enable seamless searching through
projects and their results. The best-of-breed open-source applications have
been customized and interfaced to achieve the desired functions of a collab-
orative portal. The portal is also amenable for data and tools integration from
third-party resources in addition to accepting and collating data and tools
generated by the community.
The OSDD portal design has incorporated all the components of the drug
discovery pipeline. The OSDD process divides the entire drug discovery
process into 10 work packages under which individual projects are formulated
and worked upon by researchers. This involves a chain from ideation to devel-
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