I’m talking to a group of mainly chemists and IT people at Penn State University (PSU) in Karl Mueller’s workshop on Chemistry in the Digital Age. We’ve already had three wonderful days here – two hacking PDF2Chemistry and one or OREChem. I never know what I am going to say in detail but I shall be trying to relate to the students which will be there – masters and PhD – because they are the people who will change our chemical future.
I’m calling my talk “The Chemical Semantic Web”. This is based on TimBL’s ideas of a semantic web where all information is formally defined,labelled and linked. Some people use terms like “Giant Global Graph” and others “Linked Open Data”. There’s lot’s of excitement in the SW community and lots of new tools emerging, such as triplestores.
So I’ll point back to some previous blog posts on this subject. They’ll contain thoughts and commentary. The actual presentation will contain live demos which are very difficult to point to.
Just over a month ago I spoke in BioIT on “Linked Semantic Open data”. That’s not quite the same title but it’s near enough, and these posts can help:
BioIT in Boston: What I shall say and How I shall say it (slightly moderated by the occasion so skip this if it doesn’t make sense)
BioIT in Boston: What is Open?
(Very important. If data is not Open we cannot use it in the current century. Distinguish between free-as-in-beer (gratis, not good enough) and free-as-in-speech (libre))
BioIT 2009 – What is semantic? (Discusses in medium depth what you need)
BioIT 2009 – chemical semantic concepts introduces the idea of ontologies
BioIT 2009 – What is data? -1 chemistry is built in part on data. This data must be Open. So what is it?
BioIT 2009 – Where do we get Semantic Open Data?
This should give you some background into the ideas.