Semantic Webs, Semantic Networks, and Translational Research

Tim Berners-Lee is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, the 3COM Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering, with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science MIT's CSAIL where he leads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG), and Professor of Computer Science at Southampton ECS.

Phillip Allen Sharp is an American geneticist and molecular biologist who co-discovered gene splicing. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Richard J. Roberts for "the discovery that genes in eukaryotes are not contiguous strings but contain introns, and that the splicing of messenger RNA to delete those introns can occur in different ways, yielding different proteins from the same DNA sequence".

Michael D. Prados is the Director of the Department's Translational Research Program, Dr. Prados has over 20 years' experience at UCSF in treating and supervising the treatment of both adults and children who have brain tumors. The National Cancer Institute's North American Brain Tumor Consortium, which sponsors trials of treatment regimens for brain tumors, is based at UCSF under Dr. Prados' leadership, and he is principal investigator of the Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium site at UCSF, which is one of 10 institutions in the United States selected to participate in this NIH-funded cooperative effort to develop effective new strategies for treating children with malignant brain tumors.

Translational Medicine

Nova Spivack "Making Sense of the Semantic Web”

A Smarter Web :New technologies will make online search more intelligent--and may even lead to a "Web 3.0." By John Borland.

The Semantic Web: A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities.

Expressing Meaning: The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users.
Knowledge Representation: For the semantic web to function, computers must have access to structured collections of information and sets of inference rules that they can use to conduct automated reasoning. Knowledge representation is currently in a state comparable to that of hypertext before the advent of the Web: it is clearly a good idea, and some very nice demonstrations exist, but it has not yet changed the world. It contains the seeds of important applications, but to realize its full potential it must be linked into a single global system.
Ontologies: The taxonomy defines classes of objects and relations among them.
Agents: An important facet of agents' functioning will be the exchange of "proofs" written in the Semantic Web's unifying language (the language that expresses logical inferences made using rules and information such as those specified by ontologies).
Evolution of Knowledge: The Semantic Web, in naming every concept simply by a URI, lets anyone express new concepts that they invent with minimal effort. Its unifying logical language will enable these concepts to be progressively linked into a universal Web. This structure will open up the knowledge and workings of humankind to meaningful analysis by software agents, providing a new class of tools by which we can live, work and learn together.

OWL Web Ontology Language
The Web Ontology Language (OWL) facilitates greater machine interpretability of Web content than that supported by XML, RDF, and RDF Schema (RDF-S) by providing additional vocabulary along with a formal semantics. OWL has three increasingly-expressive sublanguages: OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full.

Web Ontology Language From Wikipedia.
It is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies. The family of languages is based on two (largely, but not entirely, compatible) semantics: OWL DL and OWL Lite semantics are based on Description Logics,which have attractive and well-understood computational properties, while OWL Full uses a novel semantic model intended to provide compatibility with RDF Schema. OWL ontologies are most commonly serialized using RDF/XML syntax. OWL is considered one of the fundamental technologies underpinning the Semantic Web, and has attracted both academic and commercial interest.

Today, boundaries that inhibit data sharing limit innovation in research and clinical settings alike, and impede the efficient delivery of care. Semantic web technologies give us a chance to solve this problem, resulting, ultimately, in faster drug targeting, more accurate reporting, and better patient outcomes.(Susan Hockfield, President of MIT).

Grid computing From Wikipedia:

What is the Grid? A Three Point Checklist
Geoffrey C. Fox has been working on parallel computing and grid computing since the early 1970s.
The Grid

Semantic Webs and the Semantic Web: Services, Resources and Technologies for Clinical Care and Biomedical Research

The Semantic Web will affect clinical care and research in four broad ways (Alan Rector 2008):

Through improved information on The Semantic Web
Through tightly integrated and focused Semantic Webs serving distributed communities for specific purposes
Through the shift from information and knowledge to services - Service Oriented Architectures , Agents, and Workflows.
Through the development of more powerful semantic languages, tools, standards, and methodologies which may find application beyond the Semantic Web itself.