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SADI, SHARE, and the in silico scientific method
Mark D Wilkinson1, Luke McCarthy, Benjamin Vandervalk
1Heart + Lung Institute at St. Paul's Hospital, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. markw@illuminae.com
BMC Bioinformatics
|January 8, 2011
Summary
SADI and SHARE enable automatic discovery and pipelining of Semantic Web Services for in silico science. This framework facilitates data analysis and hypothesis generation, advancing the scientific method in life sciences.
Area of Science:
- Life Sciences
- Bioinformatics
- Computational Biology
Background:
- Semantic Web technologies offer new approaches for in silico science.
- Web Service Workflows are becoming standard for representing experiments.
- Current Semantic Web Service projects aim to simplify workflow creation for domain experts.
Purpose of the Study:
- To present a novel Semantic Web Service framework and client libraries.
- To enable semi- or fully-automatic discovery and pipelining of Semantic Web Services.
- To address limitations in representing scientific discourse and hypothesis generation using technology.
Main Methods:
- Development of the SADI (Semantic Automated Discovery and Integration) framework.
- Implementation of SHARE (Semantic Health Analytics Resource Exchange) client libraries.
- Utilizing Semantic Web Service concepts for ad hoc user query responses.
Main Results:
- SADI and SHARE allow for semi- or fully-automatic discovery of Semantic Web Services.
- The framework enables the pipelining of these services in response to user queries.
- Demonstrated application in the clinical research domain.
Conclusions:
- SADI and SHARE extend Semantic Web functionalities beyond traditional Description Logic Reasoners.
- Novel assertions can be automatically added to datasets via analytical or annotative services.
- The framework can "semantify" aspects of the in silico scientific method not yet supported by current technologies.
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