14:00 - 14:15 Introduction to VL-e (Henri Bal)

14:15 - 14:45 Workflow and data integration in e-bioscience: Some user requirements (Scot Marshall)

Abstract:

Biologists are no strangers to the problems of data integration. The processing, storage, and retrieval of experimental biological data brings with it many unsolved problems. The Integrative Bioinformatics Unit (IBU) at the University of Amsterdam would like to develop an e-Bioscience environment that is based on the VL-e project and addresses data integration. We will describe the functionality that we envision for such an environment and supply some examples of anticipated activities, with an emphasis on semantic annotation of data and services. We will also look at Taverna within this context. We will then discuss how the desired functionality can be achieved in a workflow system.

14:45 - 15:15 The Knowledge Grid and Adaptive Information Disclosure (Machiel Jansen)

Abstract:

"Ontologies" is the buzz word most often heard when people talk about the Semantic Web. In this talk I will present the idea of a Semantic or Knowledge Grid. In this view the Grid is seen by users as a service provider. Ideally users do not have to bother about questions starting with Where, What and How? As an example one can consider the following scenario: a scientist is interested in what makes green tea bitter. She wants to know answers to specific questions, have access to relevant documents, models and data and come in contact with people doing research in this field.

A Knowledge Grid should be able to fulfill this scientist information need by making use of knowledge about tea, bitterness and related domains. This knowledge, represented in ontologies can be used to annotate files, services, models and data and in that way facilitate intelligent search and reasoning capabilities. One bottleneck in this approach is the construction of ontologies: it is time consuming and labour intensive to construct them by hand. Therefore more and more people use Information Extraction and Machine Learning techniques to build up semantic structures.

The Adaptive Information Discloure group is interested in the application, construction, learning and management of ontologies. We are working closely together with people in the food industry who have put forward the above mentioned example question: What makes green tea bitter? The challenge for the group is to assist scientists in the continuing process of hypothesis forming and performing experiments by supplying them the tools for using and constructing semantic knowledge structures, also known as ontologies.

15:15 - 15:45 Talk on Data Management in VL-e (Maurice Bouwhuis)

15:45 - 16:00 Presentation of the Demos

16:00 - 16:30 Break & Demo at the LightHouse at SARA