Home » Talks and Events » 2007 » III CambridgeSemanticWebGatherings
The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. It is a collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial partners.
March 13, 2007 - Cambridge - Massachusetts - USA 
This has been the third chat about the SemanticWeb at MIT in Cambridge. The idea is to get together people in the local area who are interested in and/or working in the Semantic Web. A typical form will be a few presentations of recent work or recent problems discovered, some moderated discussion in the round, and a large amount of unmoderated chat.
At the meeting two demos have been presented :
Tim Clark presented the SWAN project that is the project I am working on (ontology and application development) here in Boston.
The SWAN project (Semantic Web Applications in Neuromedicine) aims to develop a practical, common, semantically-structured, framework for scientific discourse initially applied, but not limited, to significant problems in Alzheimer Disease (AD) research. The SWAN project is the result of a collaboration between the Alzheimer Research Forum (Alzforum) and informaticians at Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital and IBM. The initial concept has been proposed in a talk at the W3C Semantic Web in Life Sciences workshop, October 2004 [1]. SWAN has since been developed through a pilot application and is currently in the development stage of its first production-quality application [2,3,4]. The ability to use SWAN as an integrator of other semantic web ontologies for life science has begun to be shown in several collaborative demonstrator projects [5,6,7] and is an element of current use-case development work in the W3C Health Care and Life Science Task Force [8].
The SWAN project has built on Alzforum’s successful ten-year history as a scientific web community and strong social network[9,10] (currently with over 4,000 registered members) to construct a semantically-structured network of hypotheses, claims, dialogue, publications and digital repositories. Rather than attempting to construct a logically coherent model of the known facts about AD, SWAN sets itself the goal to model the scientific discourse about AD and its supporting evidence in a rich way that is compatible with functioning of the current social network as a technology-mediated ecosystem.
In many formal models of knowledge acquisition in science, research proceeds in a cycle – from hypothesis development; through experiment and data collection; to interpretation and drawing of conclusions; to communicating results to other scientists; to assimilating, criticizing and synthesizing the communications of colleagues. These practice-theory-practice cycles are socially interconnected in an extremely rich and complex way in what has been termed the “knowledge ecosystem” of science.
Theoretically this “ecosystemic” approach derives from work in industrial knowledge management [11.12] and is also inspired by third generation activity-theory approaches to human-computer interaction such as [13]. Practically it is based on many experiences in constructing information systems to support rapidly-evolving science, in which social factors and the social frame of the system were seen to strongly interact with the technology and content, critically influencing its ultimate success [14]. This approach is naturalistic and materialistic, in that it emphasizes emphasizes social factors, that is, what scientists actually do, in communicating knowledge of science.
