Workshop 2, Ontologies for neuroscience: Applications and advances

Alan Ruttenberg

Title : A Semantic Web for Neuroscience? What could that mean?

Science Commons, San Francisco, USA

Abstract: The Semantic Web is a vision of a global web of data that is as accessible, rich and malleable as the World Wide Web has come to be for documents and interaction. In this talk I'll introduce some of the technologies currently proposed for enabling such a web of data, discuss some of the ways these current technologies could be used in the service of managing and exploiting knowledge relevant to neuroscience and expose some of the challenges - scientific, technical, social, and legal, in moving towards this vision.

Bio sketch: Alan Ruttenberg is a Principal Scientist at Science Commons having previous worked for a decade as a computational  scientist in the pharmaceutical industry. His interests lies in structuring and using biological and clinical knowledge to answer questions and computationally interpret experimental data. He is a Coordinating Editor of the OBO Foundry and currently involved in a number of open biomedical ontology efforts among them the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI), the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO), the Program for Ontologies of Neural Structure (PONS), the Information Artifiact Ontology (IAO), and BioPAX-OBO for representing molecular and cellular pathways. These interests and efforts come together at Science Commons in the form of the Neurocommons, a large scale Semantic Web knowledge base of biological information aimed at supporting, initially, the neurosciences.

He is an active participant in W3C Semantic Web activities. In 2006 and 2007 he was a member of the Health Care Life Sciences Interest Group, and early work on the Neurocommons became the core of the prototype life sciences knowledge base that the group has documented.

He is co-chair of the OWL Working Group specifying OWL 2.