We’ve had an overwhelming response to our Linked Data and Health open day, which will be running this Thursday in London—there are no places left!

As a quick intro to the day, I’ll quickly post a bit of information about some of our guest speakers here, with a working title for their talks. (Please note, that the titles may change).

Alongside our guest speakers, several of us from Talis will be talking about the wider world of Linked Data, giving an overview, demos of LD applications in use, and doing our best to answer the seemingly simple question: “Why Linked Data for health?”

Dr. Nigam Shah

Dr. Shah’s research is focused on developing applications of bio-ontologies, specifically building ontology-based applications in the biomedical sciences and using Semantic Web technologies to improve search and integration of biomedical information. He teaches at Stanford on topics of how to make and use biomedical ontologies, current trends & future directions in biomedical ontologies and reasoning with biomedical data. He has co-chaired the Bio-Ontologies meeting at the ISMB conference since 2007.

Dr. Shah’s talk is: Opportunities for applying semantic technologies to health care data.

Dr. Michael Wilkinson

Dr Michael Wilkinson is the Business Development Manager for the NHS National Innovation Centre (NIC). Michael is currently leading on a programme of work to create a linked data platform to speed development of technological innovations likely to benefit the NHS. The NIC works across sectors and encourages collaboration between innovators from industry, academia, and NHS clinicians, scientists, and procurement officials. The NIC also works with other government departments and the EU to improve efficiency of innovation procurement. Prior to joining the NIC, Michael was an academic at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He has also held appointments at the Cabinet Office, Nesta, and hospitals in the USA.

Mark Birbeck

For a number of years Mark Birbeck has been involved in helping to bring about the Semantic Web, and has consulted, written and spoken widely on this and related topics. He is the originator of the W3C’s RDFa standard, and most recently he has been working on a number of semantic web projects for the UK government.

Mark will be speaking with Dr. Wilkinson, introducing the NHS clinical widget platform, which they jointly wrote about in Nodalities Magazine (pdf).

Dr. Jun Zhao

Dr Jun Zhao is an EPSRC Postdoctoral Fellow from the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford. She has computer science research background in various domains, including e-Science, provenance, Semantic Web and biological data integration. She has more than six years’ experience of applying Semantic Web research and technologies to bioinformatics and biological information representation and integration. Currently she is running her fellowship project, Open-BioMed, which investigates the use of Web of Data for publishing and integrating biomedical data resources and the role of provenance information for evaluating their trustworthiness. She is actively involved in both the W3C Health Care Life Science Interest Group and the W3C Provenance Incubator group.

Dr. Zhao’s talk will be: Linked Data for Biomedical Science: A Tale of Two Success Stories

Leigh Dodds

Leigh has significant experience of working with Semantic Web and Web technologies as both an independent hacker, researcher, as well as in production environments in a number of roles including developer, software architect and product manager. He has written about, and spoken widely on a range of semantic web topics include SPARQL, Linked Data, managing and aggregating data on the web, semantic web application development, and data licensing and management. Leigh is currently employed by Talis as the Programme Manager for the Talis
Platform and is responsible for both product strategy and business development.

Leigh’s talk is: Why Linked Data for Health?

No, these aren’t the necessary precursors for a conspiracy theory about the moon landings, but three of the topics touched upon at the first VoCamp, which took place recently in Oxford. VoCamps are events where motivated individuals can come together and spend some dedicated time creating vocabularies/ontologies for describing data on the Web.

You may have heard of these vocabulary things before. Two popular examples that have been around for some time and are in widespread usage are FOAF (as in Friend of a Friend), for describing people and who they know, and SIOC, for describing the contents of ‘social media’ sites such as blogs and discussion fora. But why do we need more vocabularies, and why do we need VoCamps?

We need more vocabularies because people are increasingly motivated to share their data online, and need some way of describing the data itself in a structured fashion. If people use the same vocabularies when describing data of the same type, or at least some of the same terms, it makes sharing and integrating those data sets much easier. For example, imagine you and I both run online shops selling sports equipment, and we want to describe the stock we hold, if we use the same vocabulary to describe that stock data then anyone wanting to cross search our two shops will benefit by not having to map my data structure to yours — we’ll have saved them the job by converging on the same vocabulary from day one.

At this point in time there just aren’t enough vocabularies around to describe the wealth of data in the world. Left to their own devices people will simply create ad-hoc vocabularies which do little to aid data sharing. It’s for these reasons that we need VoCamps, where people can put day-to-day distractions to one side and concentrate on creating technically sound vocabularies in domains that interest them, according to some of the best practices in the field.

VoCampOxford2008 was the start of this process. I used the time to work with Ian and others on a vocabulary/ontology for describing Whisky. Leigh created his Space Flight vocabulary — not just a flippant bit of fun, but a crucial component in his desire to make NASA data more widely accessible and easily archived. Other groups at VoCampOxford2008 worked on a vocabularies for describing IRC discussions, evidence, discourse, participation, votes, journeys and scientific data. See this page for more information on the vocabs we created.

Now, while some people would no doubt argue that whisky and space flight constitute the two most important topics around, there’s still some way to go in creating the rich ecosystem of vocabularies required for a Web of data. That’s why the second VoCamp will take place in Galway, Ireland in late November. Anyone interested in getting their hands (metaphorically) dirty and creating some vocabs should register now before the event fills up — it’s free. Given the location I’ll have to spend a little time in Galway refining the Whisky ontology, but no doubt there’ll be plenty of scope for creating vocabularies in other areas. I may even attempt a vocabulary for describing conspiracy theories, but I imagine that no-one would be able to agree on the details!