Members of the Scientific Advisory Board to The National Center for Biomedical Ontology are Jill P. Mesirov from Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Olivier Bodenreider from National Library of Medicine, Rex Chisholm from Northwestern University Medical School, Charles P. Friedman from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Stanley Huff from Intermountain Healthcare, Eric Miller from Zepheira, Alan L. Rector from The University of Manchester and Bedirhan Üstün from World Health Organization.

‘What we typically do on an engagement is try to capture what I would call schematic information, which is information about what relates to what. They’re deceptively simple links between entities in one silo and entities in another silo, so we’re not talking about a huge, formal, scientific, top-down modeling exercise. We’re talking about links that are almost at the level of social tagging, almost at the folksonomy level.

‘We’ve found that when you provide a basis for people to say that this entity, this sort of information in this silo relates to this other sort of information in this silo, then the people who are involved fill in the nooks and crannies. You don’t have to have this huge engineering effort to try to force a shared model between them.

‘So I think the benefit that department heads get from something like Semantic Web technology is that it’s designed to go from very slim threads and very slim connections, and then have those strengthened over time through human intervention. There’s a large social element in building shared models, and once you have built those shared models, you have the social benefit of having people enfranchised in it. Some organizations had a situation where trying to do data governance was warfare, because of the competing initiatives. Now you have given people the capability to do it piecemeal collaboratively, and you have less of the warfare and more of the cooperation aspect, which improves the system that they’re developing.’

—Uche Ogbuji, ‘From folksonomies to ontologies’, PricewaterhouseCoopers’s Technology Forecast, Spring 2009

Mr. Ogbuji also led an internal PWC webcast on this topic May 28th.

David Wood was a panel member of Issues Forum: Opportunities for Semantic Technologies within Enterprise Data Management along with Tony Shaw, Wilshire Conferences, Inc., Kevin Lynch,Central Intelligence Agency, and Sanjiva Nath, zAgile. This forum was designed to bridge the gap in understanding and start the conversation to build meaningful partnerships between enterprise customers and semantic developers.

Eric Miller and Uche Ogbuji presented Websheets – Web-based Data Integration of Spreadsheets, a discussion and demonstration of practical tools for integrating spreadsheets into unified but flexible information management systems published via the Web. (View presentation)

For abstracts of these sessions see the Enterprise Data World 2009 Agenda At-A-Glance