The W3C has just released the BioDASH Demonstration, a prototype of the semantic web for drug development. Excerpt: 'Common biological knowledge is attached to Gene entities, while knowledge specific to target identification, validation, therapeutic mechanisms, compound interactions, and toxic side-effects are associated with a Target. Both Compounds and Chemical Entities can "target" a Gene Target. This allows the aggregation and viewing of putative drug relations between a target and any set of compounds, merged from in-house drug development projects, academic research, or competitors. The basic model provided here offers enough of an initial scaffold to connect information of compounds and chemical libraries with biological entities such as genes, proteins, and pathways, in the context of a drug development project associated with one or more therapeutic areas (primary and alternative). As a real-world project progresses, its information, as well as hypotheses for this topic, can expand or be amended to this topic model. Since the data for this topic view can reside in multiple locations in different data models, the system described can be configured to work with any basic set of drug discovery data systems, aggregating select data through the intranet to offer a dashboard view of drug development with scalable degrees of granularity.' (Thanks to John Wilbanks.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/10/2005 08:17:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
