Research

Research

IBU's main research effort is in biological problem-solving and phenomenon discovery by means of data integration and computational experiment. The aim is to extend the possibilities for computer-assisted experimental biology research by building a e-bioscience problem solving environment. These goals require a solid grounding in ontologies and knowledge models in order to build semantic support into e-bioscience environments. Some of these ideas are outlined in our Semantic Web for Life Sciences position paper (pdf). Currently, our specific areas of (semantic web) application are Huntington's Disease and chromatin research, where we have begun implementing a semantic web approach to data integration.

A few of our group's long-term goals:

  • To enable computational experiments for biology research to be conducted in terms of concepts, with transparent access to workflow and grid resources such as data, knowledge models, and (web)services.
  • To make the disclosure of semantics and data provenance an essential part of experimental data production. We hope that this will convert databases and repositories from 'data graveyards' into reuseable data pools and allow data to serve as evidence linked to knowledge models.
  • Our goal of knowledge capture includes the hypothetical knowledge that is prevalent in many areas of biology research. Such knowledge cannot be expressed in the 'crisp' logic currently employed by OWL and related W3C standards. Therefore, we are interested in standards for representing and reasoning about uncertainty and probabilistic knowledge.

Activities

We participate in three large integrated national projects: "BioRange", "BioAssist" and "Virtual Lab for e-Science (VL-e)". BioRange is a nation-wide bioinformatics research project; BioAssist is a nation-wide bioinformatics support program and VL-e is the Dutch e-science project concerned with ICT infrastructure and methods, meant to support applications from a wide range of scientific disciplines.

As a member of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), the IBU takes part in the W3C Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group - a group interested in improving collaboration, research and development using semantic web technology.