“The Web is the most successful commerce and communication platform ever conceived. With the development of recent events, the Web is quickly evolving into one of the most pervasive data management, integration and knowledge sharing platforms ever imagined. Linked Data is an emerging set of concepts and technologies for combining and integrating data. Linked Data leverages the Web as an architecture for connecting data, lowering social and technical barriers sharing these connections and accelerating collaboration and social computing. The presentation will provide an overview of Linked Data and highlight several relevant, practical examples of this work. A historical perspective as well as personal observations of the evolving social, policy, government and industry trends that support this effort will also be provided. This presentation will additionally highlight related efforts libraries are currently involved in that leverage Linked Data. This presentation will conclude by suggesting strategic and symbiotic areas of work that will help libraries leverage the potential of the Web and highlight how the Web will benefit from library science principles and practice.”

GenomeSpace builds on a suite of genomic analysis tools for gene expression analysis, proteomics, SNP analysis, and other bioinformatics applications that the Broad Institute initially launched in 2004. A key aim of the project is to help researchers build and share reproducible bioinformatics workflows. GenomeSpace will obviate the need for manual data transfer between tools and will track all the provenance and history of the data and the analysis performed. Scientists will be able to replay their workflow at a later date or share it with others.

With funding from the NHGRI and the expertise of an international team of collaborators, GenomeSpace is now being built by researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Weizmann Institute of Science, University of California San Diego, University of California Santa Cruz, Pennsylvania State University and Stanford University. Members of the Scientific Advisory Group to GenomeSpace are Eugene Meyers from Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Aravinda Chakravarti from Johns Hopkins Medical School, Saeed Tavazoie and Olga Troyanskaya from Princeton University, Dan Reed from Microsoft, and Eric Miller from Zepheira

EWeek has published an story by Jim Rapoza discussing the Semantic Web. In “Spinning the Semantic Web”, Jim interviews Eric Miller of Zepheira and Tim Berners-Lee of the W3C on the increased recognition of need for technologies to assist in semantic integration of data in the Enterprise and on the Web. Even when high profile companies choose not to use specific Semantic Web technologies, it is possible to convert their proprietary data into standard and reusable forms for additional linkage in a web of data. EWeek concludes:

“Our take is that the Semantic Web will eventually succeed, as it holds too many benefits for too many people to fall by the wayside. But it’s also likely that the Semantic Web won’t come about in the exact same way that many people envision. The lesson of the Web 2.0 technologies is that users are often surprising in the way they utilize new technologies. Miller told us that he had already seen businesses using Semantic Web technologies in interesting and unexpected ways.” “Spinning the Semantic Web”, 29 May 2007.