Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Even though the Semantic Web's key enhancement to the current Web is
its improved computational accessibility, the success of semantically enabled
browsers in connecting human users with information integrated through
RDF will likely prove pivotal in exactly the same way that browsers are vital
to the adoption and rapid growth of the original Web. To effectively make use
of the triples, effi cient searching and creative reasoning with massive quantities
of concept triples must be supported. This requires a reasoning algorithm, a
reasoning engine, a way to express queries, and a way to browse results. The
mechanisms for navigating through RDF graphs are starting to be realized in
a variety of emerging Semantic Web browsers [9-17].
Clearly, using the identical identifi ers across the board for concepts and
assertions makes data collection and aggregation simpler, but the key limita-
tion is that there is no requirement to do so. Indeed, any Semantic Web
resource can be used, although nanopublication publishers should follow ini-
tiatives like Linked Open Data [18] and the “shared names initiative” of the
Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences (HCLS) Interest Group [19].
26.4
CONCEPT WEB ALLIANCE AND CONCEPTWIKI
A major impetus to achieving the potential of the shared identifi ers for the
semantic technologies is the collaborative mindset represented by the Concept
Web Alliance (CWA). The CWA is a recently chartered nonprofi t organization
whose mission is “to enable an open collaborative environment to jointly
address the challenges associated with high volume scholarly and professional
data production, storage, interoperability and analyses for knowledge discov-
ery” (from the CWA declaration, available at http://www.nbic.nl/about-nbic/
affi liated-organisations/cwa/declaration). Together, the CWA partners will
enhance existing information exchange by developing open-platform proto-
cols, data formats, workfl ow tools, and semantic integration to overcome exist-
ing legacies and information bottlenecks. In this capacity, the CWA has
demonstrated a leadership role in obtaining service- and application-level
agreements for public data and established consensus expertise in the area of
semantic frameworks. Both aspects represent key factors necessary for estab-
lishing standards that will sustain processes required for mediating large-scale
data interoperability. Drawing on its diverse membership in academia and
private enterprise, the CWA is uniquely positioned as a trusted agent to
mediate this unprecedented confederation of existing public and private infor-
mation. As an initial venture, the CWA will provide ConceptWiki as a reposi-
tory of uniquely identifi able and unambiguous uniform resource locators
(URLs) for concepts.
ConceptWiki (http://www.conceptwiki.org) is an open-access system that
accepts essentially unlimited numbers of synonyms, in multiple languages, and
then maps all the terms correctly back to one unique concept identifi er, alleviat-
ing problems of vocabulary and identifi er differences. ConceptWiki is built on
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