Andrew Walkingshaw on making the Semantic Web usable for scientists

I first ran into Andrew Walkingshaw when I saw his excellent talk on Web 2.0 for scientists on YouTube. At Scifoo, I got a chance to meet Andrew and help coordinate a session where he presented Golem, a project that has since seen the light of life. The talk emphasized the need to abstract out the technology from the end users. This week Andrew is at Semantic Camp where he has a presentation on automatically indexing science (slides below). The presentation gives you a real taste of what Golem seeks to accomplish.

| View | Upload your own

The goal in essence is to take the chemical data captured as CML and make it more usable to the general audience. The key is slide 40, where Andrew talks about SPARQL and how scientists shouldn’t need to know SPARQL, which makes it very important to present a usable front end to your average scientist. This is a point that cannot be overemphasized. We have wonderful technology; technology that enables us to extract rich information from out datasets. The challenge to the development community is simple. How can we bring this technology to the scientific community and truly enable them? It is also why I argue so often that your average computational scientists shouldn’t be developing websites. There are just too many crummy services out there.

Technorati Tags: Semantic Web, Talis, Web Services, Andrew Walkingshaw