Linked Data

The concept of linked data is not new, but is finally hitting the tipping point for implementation where thought leaders, technology, and business drivers are coming together to bring it from theory to reality. Tim Berners-Lee gave a great talk on this topic at a TED conference. Check it out here.

I was moderating a talk at the recent AAPS conference in Seattle and one of my panelists was Randy Julian, from Indigo Biosystems. He focused his talk on the value of linked data in the pharma research space and how it can revolutionize the collaboration process. I very much enjoyed the talk and our subsequent, but brief conversation. We agreed to talk more and I had to bolt as I had meetings with Microsoft and had to catch a plane for Europe to speak at another conference. Things continued to come together with the meeting at Microsoft. While the discussion was brief, it centered around the Amalga platform and the underlying technology. The aim is very similar, in that it looks at data at the atomic level with appropriate meta data for context and just in time reassembly as needed, inferring relationships automatically. The implications for predictive and retrospective automated analysis are huge.

Later that week, I spoke at a conference in Budapest and caught a talk with Nico Adams, from Cambridge University in the UK. He talked about the Semantic Web and how it applies to the research area. We later had dinner with the larger group and talked a bit more. It is encouraging to me to see the synergy across the world, and it points to the critical mass that is building around this topic.