I have long been intrigued by IO Informatics and their flagship Sentient Suite. Bio-IT World is carrying an article about the company that reminded me of that interest. I have never used it, so I wonder if anyone else out there has?
Now the Sentient Suite doesn’t really sit on the WWW, so it’s not really an optimal Semantic Web product, but it does use RDF, a wonderful data model for the kind of data life scientists use, rich in relationships and metadata, and SPARQL to query the data. So at least within the confines of a company’s data sources, in theory you have a rich graph of data which can be queried. I’ve long felt that we either don’t leverage structured data optimally in much life science software, or over engineer it. The company claims to be smart about how it’s doing this, although given the complexity of data, how well they achieve their goals is something I question.
My ideal would be a life science version of the Talis platform, perhaps with an industry facing side (much the way Talis has its library business), and a public facing side that sits on the web with published APIs and the underlying technology that allows developers to build tools on top of it. I am sure they’d be a ton of takers. IO has one side of this (the enterprise facing side). Would be cool if they, or someone else, made a platform available publicly, with some underlying intelligence that can be leveraged by APIs.
Dreaming of a life science Semantic Web platform
I have long been intrigued by IO Informatics and their flagship Sentient Suite. Bio-IT World is carrying an article about the company that reminded me of that interest. I have never used it, so I wonder if anyone else out there has?
Now the Sentient Suite doesn’t really sit on the WWW, so it’s not really an optimal Semantic Web product, but it does use RDF, a wonderful data model for the kind of data life scientists use, rich in relationships and metadata, and SPARQL to query the data. So at least within the confines of a company’s data sources, in theory you have a rich graph of data which can be queried. I’ve long felt that we either don’t leverage structured data optimally in much life science software, or over engineer it. The company claims to be smart about how it’s doing this, although given the complexity of data, how well they achieve their goals is something I question.
My ideal would be a life science version of the Talis platform, perhaps with an industry facing side (much the way Talis has its library business), and a public facing side that sits on the web with published APIs and the underlying technology that allows developers to build tools on top of it. I am sure they’d be a ton of takers. IO has one side of this (the enterprise facing side). Would be cool if they, or someone else, made a platform available publicly, with some underlying intelligence that can be leveraged by APIs.