SEMANTIC WEBS FOR LIFE SCIENCES

The Semantic Web is a vision for the next generation of the Web [1]. The Web is a huge interlinked information resource, but is largely restricted to human use because the information is represented only in natural language. The goal of the Semantic Web is to make these data – the facts on the Web – amenable to computational processing. To date, the Semantic Web has largely been pushed by technology development, but the life sciences are seen to be a huge area for potential application development. Indeed, a recent workshop on this subject saw over 100 attendees, indicating a great interest in the community1. The Semantic Web’s broad goal parallels that of many bioinformaticians. There are vast quantities of biological data and associated annotations, or knowledge, now available on the Web. These resources are highly distributed and heterogeneous. This heterogeneity exists at many levels, the most pernicious of which are the semantic heterogeneities in the schema and the values placed in those schema. Semantic Web technologies and the vision itself offer a solution to this long-standing problem in creating an integrated view of bioinformatics. Lincoln Stein describes this situation as being akin to the rival city states in medieval Italy and talks of the need to create a “bioinformatics nation ” [6]. This vision is at one level of heterogeneity – the programmatic access to bioinformatics resources. Stein describes the use of Web Services, a Semantic Web technology, to provide a common form of access to distributed resources with heterogeneous