Semantic Web - Revolutionizing Knowledge Discovery in the Life Sciences

The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. Advanced Semantic Web technologies are now enabling a wide range of tasks of central importance to the management of life science information.

This book introduces these technologies to life science and bioinformatics professionals, illustrating their utility and highlighting their implementation in biological, medical and clinical scenarios. In six parts the book covers the topics of database and literature integration, knowledge representation, knowledge visualization, the utilization of formal knowledge representations, and access to distributed knowledge. The factors impacting on the establishment of the semantic web in life science and the legal challenges that will impact on its proliferation are addressed in the concluding part.