Views over the semantic web

Presented by Jim Brinkley, Marianne Shaw, Todd Detwiler, Nicola Dell

The rising popularity of the semantic web is resulting in an increasingly large number of RDF data sources available on the Internet, representing both data and knowledge in the form of OWL/RDF ontologies. These resources are gradually being linked together into a global database that promises to greatly enhance our ability to access the most relevant information at the point of need. However, this very increase in resources often makes it difficult for users to navigate the global database to find just the information of interest. The goal of our work is to make it easier for users and developers to access only relevant information by leveraging the database concept of views. Just as relational views allow only relevant aspects of relational tables to be presented through the use of saved SQL queries, so too will RDF views allow only the most relevant RDF information to be presented through saved SPARQL queries.
In this presentation Jim Brinkley will provide a high level overview of the needs and application for RDF views in the context of biomedicine; Marianne Shaw will describe two extensions to SPARQL that enable the creation of such views: vSPARQL (“view SPARQL”) and IML (“InterMediate Language” that compiles to vSPARQL); Todd Detwiler will describe and demonstrate the implementation of vSPARQL and IML in a View Query Manager and engine that is accessible on our website at http://axon.biostr.wa... and Nicola Dell will describe and demonstrate her work to create graphical methods for generating IML queries.
This is collaborative work among the Structural Informatics Group (SIG) at the UW, led by Jim Brinkley; the database group in the Dept of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the UW, led by Dan Suciu, the graphics and vision group in CSE at UW, led by Linda Shapiro; and the National Center for Bioontology at Stanford University, led by Mark Musen.

Jim Brinkley is professor in Biological Structure, Medical Education and Biomedical Informatics, and Computer Science and Engineering; and director of SIG at the UW. He is a biomedical informaticist and principal investigator of the collaborative NIH grant with Stanford that funds this work.
Dan Suciu is professor in CSE at the UW. He is a database expert and co-director of this project.
Linda Shapiro is professor in CSE at the UW. She is a graphics and computer vision expert and co-director of this project.
Mark Musen is professor in Biomedical Informatics at Stanford, and director of the NIH-funded National Center for Bioontology (NCBO, http://www.bioontolog.... NCBO maintains a large repository of biomedical ontologies called Bioportal. The initial use case for the RDF view methods is to create views over the ontologies in Bioportal.
Marianne Shaw is a graduating PhD student in CSE, and the developer of vSPARQL and IML.
Todd Detwiler has an MS in CSE from UW and is a research scientist working in SIG. He is the developer of the View Query Manager.
Nicola Dell is a first year PhD student in CSE. She is developing graphical methods for generating IML for her quals project.

Venue and Refreshments are sponsored by SQLSoft+ "the Gold Standard in Training" (Thank you Dennis James! - and SQLSoft+)

Co-Sponsorship by IEEE Computer Society of Seattle (Thank you Mike Becker and our setup and cleanup group)