Mark Musen:"Semantic Technology in Science: Data Stewardship & New Discovery" (COST DKG Talk Series)
Channel: COST DKG
Date: 2024-03-04

Abstract: Much of the Semantic Web research community emerged from the cadre of investigators who were studying the engineering of knowledge-based systems in the 1990s.  Development of such systems required intense interactions between modelers and subject-matter experts to build symbolic representations of discipline-specific knowledge.  Such knowledge-engineering activities may be making a comeback, as funders and regulators require scientists of all kinds to share their experimental datasets online, in a manner that makes the data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR).  At the core of data FAIRness is the idea that the metadata that describe experimental datasets must adhere to the standards used by the relevant scientific communities, aiding dataset search and integration.  Typically, those metadata standards are not well specified, which impedes the ability of researchers to locate existing datasets and to perform secondary analysis in the hope of making new discoveries.  This situation is driving a new kind of knowledge engineering—one to formalize the preferences of various scientific communities regarding the way their experiments should be described. The CEDAR Workbench, a suite of tools that builds on other semantic technologies that we have developed at Stanford University, demonstrates how the elicitation and formal representation of community standards for experimental metadata both enhances access to and reuse of scientific datasets and, by extension, can lead to better science. 

Bio: Dr. Musen is the Stanford Medicine Professor of Biomedical Informatics Research at Stanford University.  He conducts research related to open science, intelligent systems, computational ontologies, and biomedical decision support.  His group developed Protégé, the world's most widely used technology for building and managing terminologies and ontologies. He served as principal investigator of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology, one of the original National Centers for Biomedical Computing created by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, leading to the BioPortal ontology repository.  He directs the Center for Expanded Data Annotation and Retrieval (CEDAR), founded under the NIH Big Data to Knowledge Initiative.  CEDAR develops semantic technology to ease the authoring and management of experimental metadata.  Dr. Musen was the recipient of the Donald A. B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics from the American Medical Informatics Association in 2006.  He has been elected to the American College of Medical Informatics, the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics, and the U.S. National Academy of Medicine.