Preparing for ISWC2014

Next week I’ll have the great pleasure to attend my first Int. Semantic Web Conference (ISWC). I've been  fascinated by the power of the semantic web stack of standards for many years. Standards all based on the RDF model to represent and link data, as well as schemas, models and terminologies. I heard Tim Berners-Lee talk about the Semantic Web for the first time at the WWW8 conference back in 1999 in Toronto, Canada.

13th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2014,
will take place in Riva del Garda, Terentino, Italy.

At ISWC2014 I’ll present a follow-up paper to the one I presented in early September at the Medical Informatics Europe conference (see my earlier blog post: Preparing for MIE2014). It is a joint paper with colleagus from IMI EHR4CR, Open PHACTS, FP7 SALUS, W3C HCLS. Now with more details on the use of nanopubs and linksets in A Justification-based Semantic Framework for Representing, Evaluating and Utilizing Terminology Mappings. It will be discussed on Sunday in a pre-conference workshop organized by Alasdair Gray (@gray_alasdair), Paul Groth (@pgroth) et al. Workshop on Context, Interpretation and Meaning

I'm also also looking forward to participate in the Semantic Statistics workshop to learn more about things like the Data Cube for statistical data. This is a highly relevant topic for FDA/PhUSE and CDISC as representing clinical trial analysis results data as RDF Data Cubes is a topic at the ongoing PhUSE conference (presentation from UCB) and at the upcoming CDISC Interchange (presentation from DIcore Group, LLC, SAS Data Submission Consulting Services).

Tuesday evening I’ve been asked by James Malone (@jamesmalone) from EBI to sit on a panel at the European Ontology Network (EUON) Town Hall meeting together with Mark Musen, Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research (I’m star strucked ;-) (Started earlier this year at the 1st EUON workshop in Amsterdam.)

I’m looking forward to meet interesting people from the semantic web community, and also newcombers to the community from organizations such as WHO, Roche, and CDISC. Magnus Wallberg from Uppsala Monitoring Centre WHO, working on a API and  RDF project for Global ICSR statistics. Also from the FDA/PhUSE Semantic Technology project there will be presentations form Landen Bain, CDISC, and Frederik Malfait, Roche, will present at the Industry Track on Wednesday.

I’ll try to keep my Storify-ISWC2014 updated during the week with interesting tweets, links and notes. And I know the Twitter-tag #iswc2014 feed will be lively as I’ve followed several earlier ISWC conferences on a distance.