WC11 session S67 on "Using the Sematic Web for Rapid Integration of Publicly Available Biological Information"

Chairs of the session and three speakers
during the QA at the session end.

This week the 11th edition of the World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences is held in Maastricht. Well, virtually in Maastricht. It was originally supposed to be held last year, but, yeah, we know why. Yesterday the S67 session on "Using the Sematic Web for Rapid Integration of Publicly Available Biological Information" took place, chaired Holly Mortensen (EPA) and Penny Nymark (KI).

Thomas Exner started the session outlining the OpenRiskNet and NanoCommons projects and why semantics matter in integrative projects like this.

I was the second speaker and give an overview of how we (current and past groups) have been using RDF technologies. My slides are here and the video recording is here.

Third speaker was Jerven "RDF is the superior choice for FAIR data" Bolleman showing us around in the 44 billion triples of UniProt. In my talk I stressed that you can achieve semantics with other technologies too, but I full agree with Jerven's notice that RDF just makes it a whole lot easier. Sure, there is a learning curve, but the return on investment is enormous, just because making up semantics during data analysis is so much more costly than removing semantics when wrapping, for example, a REST-full API around semantic knowledge.

Marvin Martens (PhD candidate in our research group) spoke about his AOPWiki semantification (see this preprint) and applications. Check out his AOPWiki RDF and his other publicationspublications:

Penny Nymark (we first met at the hackathon of the kick-off meeting of the eNanoMapper project) acted as co-chair and speaker in the section informing us about all her work on adverse outcome pathways.