Marco Roos (LUMC) created a tutorial on how research that requires analyses across different data sources can be sped up using Linked Data and Ontologies.
It starts with an example of a researcher who wishes to compare information from three Huntington’s Disease population studies. She finds herself spending most of her time on aligning the data from these three resources, finding out what measurements mean, which can be compared and how. The resolution of this problem is left to all scientists who wish to use the data for comparison and integration. Considering that biomedical data is valuable for more than one researcher, this is very inefficient. The tutorial shows how a Linked Data and Ontology approach tackles this problem at the source by encoding data and the associated semantic types in a computer readable format conform a global standard.
The tutorial was created in the context of the EU project ‘RD-Connect‘ that aims to build a platform for global research on Rare Diseases. It was inspired by input and slides from many experts on the Semantic Web such as Frank van Harmelen, Paul Groth, Scott Marshall, Andrew Gibson, and Barend Mons. It was part of a hands-on tutorial for Rare Disease researchers prepared by Pedro Lopes, Mark Thompson, Eelke van der Horst, Rajaram Kalyaperumal, and Marco Roos.