Towards Knowledge Federation for Biomedical Applications

Knowledge federation is a particular matter of concern in the life sciences domain. The magnitude of data generated by biomedical software and hardware since the initial discovery of the human genome is tremendous in quantity and diversity. Consequently, state-of-the-art software solutions have always lagged behind researchers’ demands, even more so with recent developments in high-throughput sequencing technology and open access to digital disease records.

The maturity of Semantic Web technologies brought with it new strategies to tackle life sciences challenges. In spite of the increased awareness regarding these technologies’ advantages, its adoption has been slow paced. With a steep learning curve and lacking turnkey solutions, bioinformatics developers are faced with many roadblocks, resulting in a low number of purely semantic solutions.

Our research springs new life to knowledge federation in the life sciences with a new application deployment framework, which includes a native federation layer connecting and federating deployed instances by default. This feature is integrated in a complete software stack for creating new applications, easing the troubled development cycle associated with Semantic Web tools. As a result, the door is opened for harnessing more insightful knowledge from the aggregated network of relationships amongst biological data.