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Briefings in Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on August 9, 2006
Briefings in Bioinformatics 2006 7(3):275-286; doi:10.1093/bib/bbl025
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The Life Sciences Semantic Web is Full of Creeps!

Benjamin M. Good and Mark D. Wilkinson

Corresponding author. Mark Wilkinson. James Hogg iCAPTURE Centre for Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Research, Room 166, ‘1081 Burrard St., Vancouver, BC, V6Z 1Y6. Tel. +1 (604) 682 2344 x62129; Fax: +1 604 806 9274;E-mail: mwilkinson{at}mrl.ubc.ca.

The Semantic Web for the Life Sciences (SWLS), when realized, will dramatically improve our ability to conduct bioinformatics analyses using the vast and growing stores of web-accessible resources. This ability will be achieved through the widespread acceptance and application of standards for naming, representing, describing and accessing biological information. The W3C-led Semantic Web initiative has established most, if not all, of the standards and technologies needed to achieve a unified, global SWLS. Unfortunately, the bioinformatics community has, thus far, appeared reluctant to fully adopt them. Rather, we are seeing what could be described as ‘semantic creep’—timid, piecemeal and ad hoc adoption of parts of standards by groups that should be stridently taking a leadership role for the community. We suggest that, at this point, the primary hindrances to the creation of the SWLS may be social rather than technological in nature, and that, like the original Web, the establishment of the SWLS will depend primarily on the will and participation of its consumers.

Keywords: Semantic Web, Ontologies, RDF, LSID, OWL, Bioinformatics, Creeps


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