Alquier, L., Schultz, T., and Stephens, S. 2010. Exploration of a Data Landscape using a Collaborative Linked Data Framework. In Proceedings of the The Future of the Web for Collaborative Science, WWW2010 (Raleigh, North Carolina, April 26, 2010) – presentation – paper
Finding the most relevant data sources for answering translational research questions represents a significant challenge in a global and highly decentralized research organization. This challenge is only likely to increase as more data becomes available from external collaborations.
This paper presents an approach to enabling scientists to find data source of interest, and to then query and visualize the data. The solution consists of knowIT, a semantic wiki that provides a foundation for capturing explicit knowledge about sources of data in a collaborative fashion. As the metadata about the data sources is exposed as Resource Description Framework (RDF), knowIT is able to provide knowledge of the biomedical resources to other applications as part of a Linked Data framework.
Illustrations are provided as to how the solution can be used for search and visualization of the biomedical data landscape.