Katy Börner Co-Hosts Workshop on Exploiting Big Data Semantics for Translational Medicine
| CNS News
On March 25 and 26, Indiana University School of Library and
Information Science and School of Informatics and Computing hosted
a workshop on Exploiting Big Data Semantics for Translational
Medicine. This workshop brought together leading practitioners
from around the world in the areas of semantic technologies,
network science and visualization, and computational translational
medicine to identify the most critical areas for collaboration
between these fields to maximize impact on the next generation of
disease treatments.
There has recently been an explosion of public and
proprietary healthcare and drug discovery data, and the
development of powerful semantic, network and visualization
technologies for integrating and mining these data, including the
major E.U. sponsored OpenPHACTS project. These novel datasets and
technologies open up many possibilities for drug discovery and
translational medicine, including drug repurposing, target
identification, gene-disease association and patient population
mapping. In parallel, major efforts are underway such as the U.S.
NCATS at NIH that support translational medicine and streamlined
discovery of new medical therapies in the public sphere.
This small, focused workshop will bring together invited
leading practitioners in semantic technologies, network science
and visualization, and computational translational medicine to
identify the most critical areas for collaboration between these
fields to maximize impact on the next generation of disease
treatments.
The event was organized by David Wild, Assistant Professor, IU School of
Informatics and Computing, Director of IU Cheminformatics Program,
Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Cheminformatics; Ying
Ding, Associate Professor, Information Science, SLIS, Indiana
University, Bloomington, IN; Katy Börner, Victor H. Yngve Professor of
Information Science, SLIS, Indiana University, Director of the
Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center & Curator of
Mapping Science exhibit, Bloomington, IN; and Eric Gifford of
Merck.