Monday, July 29, 2013

Semantic Trilogy report part 1

It's been two very nice summer weeks of vacation after I got home from a week at the Semantic Trilogy events in Montreal, Qc, Canada. (See my previous blog post: Semantic Trilogy preparations.) Here's the first part of my report from seven intensive days of conferences, tutorials, workshops and great discussions with researchers in biomedical ontologies and data integration in life sciences.

It was very nice to meet colleagues from other pharma companies; Sanofi, UCB and NovoNordisk, and to discuss with early adopters in traditional software vendors, such as Siemens, and with experts from niche vendors, such as IO Informatics. It was also nice to discuss common topics, such the use of semantic web standards and linked data principles on for example clinicaltrials.gov, with key individuals such as Olivier Bodenreider, NLM (National Library of Medicine).

Notes
During the two main conferences I used Twitter as my note book and in the evenings I gather tweets and related links in two Storify items:
  • ICBO2013
    Storify: 4th Interational Conference on Biomedical Ontology (ICBO), 7-9 July
  • DILS2013
    Storify: 9th Conference on Data Integration in the Life Sciences (DILS), 11-12 July 
My poster
The last evening I presented a CDISC2RDF poster on our joint AstraZeneca and Roche CDISC2RDF project, now part of the FDA/Phuse Semantic Technology working group. I really enjoyed the discussions it triggered.

I'll be back in mid August, after couple of days of trecking in the Swedish mountains, with more details about the papers, presentations and discussions I did find most interesting. (For a first glimpse of two of them see this blog post from HL7 Watch by Barry Smith: An OGMS-Based Model for Clinical Information.)