Next Generation Cancer Data Discovery, Access, and Integration Using Prizms and Nanopublications.

To encourage data sharing in the life sciences, supporting tools need to minimize effort and maximize incentives. We have created infrastructure that makes it easy to create portals that supports dataset sharing and simplified publishing of the datasets as high quality linked data. We report here on our infrastructure and its use in the creation of a melanoma dataset portal. This portal is based on the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) and Prizms, an infrastructure to acquire, integrate, and publish data using Linked Data principles. In addition, we introduce an extension to CKAN that makes it easy for others to cite datasets from within both publications and subsequently-derived datasets using the emerging nanopublication and World Wide Web Consortium provenance standards.

The Translational Medicine Ontology and Knowledge Base: driving personalized medicine by bridging the gap between bench and bedside.

BACKGROUND: Translational medicine requires the integration of knowledge using heterogeneous data from health care to the life sciences. Here, we describe a collaborative effort to produce a prototype Translational Medicine Knowledge Base (TMKB) capable of answering questions relating to clinical practice and pharmaceutical drug discovery. RESULTS: We developed the Translational Medicine Ontology (TMO) as a unifying ontology to integrate chemical, genomic and proteomic data with disease, treatment, and electronic health records. We demonstrate the use of Semantic Web technologies in the integration of patient and biomedical data, and reveal how such a knowledge base can aid physicians in providing tailored patient care and facilitate the recruitment of patients into active clinical trials. Thus, patients, physicians and researchers may explore the knowledge base to better understand therapeutic options, efficacy, and mechanisms of action. CONCLUSIONS: This work takes an important step in using Semantic Web technologies to facilitate integration of relevant, distributed, external sources and progress towards a computational platform to support personalized medicine. AVAILABILITY: TMO can be downloaded from http://code.google.com/p/translationalmedicineontology and TMKB can be accessed at http://tm.semanticscience.org/sparql.