Training

The Semantic Web offers a vision of a data centric infrastructure which enables integration, analysis and reuse of the wealth of data that exists both now and in the future. To make this 'web of data' a reality, it is necessary to have these vast volumes of data use a standardised format and explicit descriptions such that the data can be unambiguously understood and exchanged. Ontologies described in the Web Ontology Language (OWL)  provide a formal, standardised representation of the data and the relationships between this data and offer a mechanism by which data integration exchange can occur. Connecting these description with the openly available data on the web is termed "Linked Open Data". Linked Open Data has become important to the biomedical community where the quantities of open data available have become so large that computational methods of integration and analysis are necessary to enable cross-domain sharing and integration and novel insights to continue. In the tutorial you will learn about Semantic Web technology for the integration of biological data from different data resources including the scientific literature. We will examine the role of ontologies in the Linked Open Data vision and those widely used in the bioinformatics community and will illustrate how the use of biomedical ontologies can have practical applications in the linked data vision of the Semantic Web.