Abstract. Adding provenance to existing systems can benefit users, but comes at an expense that may be difficult for some to justify. This tradeoff can be overcome by increasing the value of provenance, by decreasing the cost to add it -or by doing both. This paper offers a contribution for each. First, we develop further the W3C PROV pingback technique so that it may reach its potential to interconnect provenance records that would traditionally sit in isolation, thus increasing their value. Second, we reduce the expense to publish the provenance of existing host systems by using minimal coupling to the Prizms Linked Data platform. Using an Earth Sciences scenario and the OPeNDAP data transport architecture as an example host system, we investigate how PROV pingback could work in practice, demonstrate its potential, and identify outstanding issues that must be addressed before it can be widely adopted.
BackgroundTranslational medicine requires the integration of knowledge using heterogeneous data from health care to the life sciences. Here, we describe a collaborative effort to produce a prototype Translational Medicine Knowledge Base (TMKB) capable of answering questions relating to clinical practice and pharmaceutical drug discovery.ResultsWe developed the Translational Medicine Ontology (TMO) as a unifying ontology to integrate chemical, genomic and proteomic data with disease, treatment, and electronic health records. We demonstrate the use of Semantic Web technologies in the integration of patient and biomedical data, and reveal how such a knowledge base can aid physicians in providing tailored patient care and facilitate the recruitment of patients into active clinical trials. Thus, patients, physicians and researchers may explore the knowledge base to better understand therapeutic options, efficacy, and mechanisms of action.ConclusionsThis work takes an important step in using Semantic Web technologies to facilitate integration of relevant, distributed, external sources and progress towards a computational platform to support personalized medicine.AvailabilityTMO can be downloaded from http://code.google.com/p/translationalmedicineontology and TMKB can be accessed at http://tm.semanticscience.org/sparql.
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