SSWAP: Simple Semantic Web Architecture and Protocol runs the Virtual Plant Information Network (VPIN)

Tuesday - Early Afternoon, January 16, 2007 -- 1:30 pm - 3:40 pm

Location: California Room

Biology is rapidly becoming a joint experimental and information science. Yet the situation today is one where vast amounts of information are dispersed across a wide variety of web sites. This creates an obstacle for research, because there are no broadly-accepted standards for computers to automatically search, retrieve, and integrate data or invoke services on a high-throughput basis. Because of this, computer programmers and scientific researchers expend considerable effort simply finding, retrieving, and aggregating biological information from varied sites.

The semantic web is revolutionizing the approach to web access by employing an area called Description Logics. We have implemented this in a new protocol called SSWAP (Simple Semantic Web Architecture and Protocol), which allows web sites to describe their data and services in terms of logical relationships and a public context. This differs from the more traditional approach of relying solely on syntactical convention in order to establish machine-machine interoperability. The Virtual Plant Information Network (VPIN) uses SSWAP to deliver a functional semantic platform to biologists. This work has also led us to pioneer new representations and uses of ontologies (classification systems that relate concepts via relationships) to create a mechanism for shared, public semantics. SSWAP and the VPIN use the W3C standards of OWL-DL for logic-based descriptions, queries, and reasoning, and RDF/XML for serialization.

Please join us for this orientation talk or visit us at sswap.info and vpin.ncgr.org.

Tutorial Level

Beginner to Intermediate. Attendees should be comfortable using the web.

Intended Audience

People interested in how the semantic web is being used in biology and developers for web resources.