Colloquia, Seminars and Conference News
Title : Semantic Web for Data Integration in the Life Sciences
Date : December 6, 2006. (11:00 am) Tea starts half an hour before each seminar
Location: ITEB 336
Speaker : Prof. Kei-Hoi Cheung
Abstract:
Data integration is an important problem in the Life Sciences. Many areas of biomedical research including drug discovery, systems biology, and individualized medicine heavily rely on integrating data sets produced by different experimental methods, in different groups, with heterogeneous data formats, and at different levels of granularity.
Despite the ongoing research in database integration in the past several decades, there remain unsolved problems. Among these problems, the lack of a widely-adopted data representation standard is particularly prominent in the life science domain. Such a problem is becoming more acute, both due to continuous increases in data volumes and the growing diversity in types and formats of data that need to be integrated. As many of these datasets are Web-accessible, the emergence of Semantic Web brings the vision to standardizing the format of these datasets in a machine-readable way, enabling more intelligent data representation and integration. This talk gives an introduction of Semantic Web and describes the issues involved in life science data integration. It also gives some examples illustrating how Semantic Web can be used to address these issues.
Bio:Dr. Cheung earned his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Connecticut. He is currently an Associate Professor at the Yale Center for Medical Informatics and has a joint appointment with the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Genetics. He is one of the core faculty members of the Ph.D. program in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at Yale. His research interest lies in the area of bioinformatics database development and integration. Recently, he has explored the use of Semantic Web as a standard technology for integrating life science data. He is an invited expert of the Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Science Interest Group. He co-edited a book titled "Semantic Web: Revolutionizing Knowledge Discovery in the Life Sciences", which will be published by Springer in December, 2006. In addition to book and journal publications, Dr. Cheung received a research career development award from the National Institutes of Health and a research grant from the National Science Foundation.
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