The ChEMBL-og

Yesterday saw the release of the EMBL-EBI RDF Platform , the official announcement can be found here . The purpose of this new platform is to act as a central resource for all RDF and Semantic Technology focused work being carried out at the EMBL-EBI. The benefit to users of the RDF version of the ChEMBL database is that you now have access to documentation , a SPARQL endpoint , example SPARQL queries and a Linked Data browser . Other EMBL-EBI resources involved in this project include BioModels , BioSamples , Expression Atlas , Reactome and UniProt - we expect the number of resources offering RDF versions of their data to grow over the coming year. One of the very cool things the new platform offers users is the ability to run federated SPARQL queries across the separate resources listed above. Essentially this is removing the data integration burden, which would have previously been required in order to answer the questions asked by the federated queries. Example feder...

As part of the ChEMBL groups involvement in the OpenPhacts project, a representative from the ChEMBL team will be attending SWAT4LS next week. As well as hacking and learning about new Semantic technologies there may be time to catch up with ChEMBL users also attending the workshop. So if you would like to hear about what we are doing with the Semantic Web, RDF or just have a general chat about ChEMBL, please get in touch .

The world of data informatics is seeing a cultural change, from a world of databases, such as Chembl , to one where data is more self-descriptive and ad hoc queryable - an evolution into knowledge-bases : The data will be organized around controlled dictionaries and ontologies ( Semantic Web ), more exposed to programmatic and web service infrastructures, and more robustly linked to other repositories (for a current example of a large nascent network of coordinated data repositories, see the  ELIXIR  project). Brain  is a library created to achieve such linkage: It can handle and query large biomedical knowledge-bases. The Brain library can also serve as a framework for users interested in  Description Logic and Biology. Website of the library:  http://loopasam.github.com/Brain/ Documentation:  https://github.com/loopasam/Brain/wiki

There's an interesting blog post that I was directed to recently, and it may be of interest to a broader audience. It's here  on David Price's blog and details the loading of an early version of ChEMBL into OWL using D2R under TopBraid Composer . Shame there's no updates since the original post...