Bio and Health Informatics Group
University of Manchester
The Changing Nature of Biomedical Research: Semantic e-Science
Biomedical
science, like other sciences, is driven by observations. We wish to
record these observations and how we made those observations. Such
recording is a central part of the scientific process. Recently the
life sciences have been producing observations (data or "facts") on an
industrial scale. e-Science infra-structure is beginning to enable
analysis on an industrial scale. The scientific process, however,
requires both scientists and computers to share and communicate their
facts and how these facts were generated (the protocols). In order to
enable communication, both for humans and computers, we need common
descriptions of facts, how these facts were produced and the ways in
which these facts are analysed. Life science has begun to describe its
data with terms supplied by ontologies. Life scientists are beginning
to describe the semantics of their experiments (both wet and dry). The
services that analyse these data are beginning to be semantically
described. Semantic descriptions of services and data can come together
with e-Science to give semantic e-Science that will afford many
analytical opportunities for scientists. In this talk I will describe
semantic science, e-Science and how these come together.
Robert Stevens is a senior lecturer
in the BioHealth Informatics Group. His background in biochemistry,
biological computation and computer science enables him to work at the
interface between computer science and biology. Robert's main interest
is in the computational representation of knowledge in ontologies and
how this can be used to describe and analyse biological data. This is
combined with the development and use of e-Science infra-structure.