Abstract:

The Semantic Web is an emerging web of knowledge. It provides the basis upon which we can publish, share and link data, and perhaps more saliently, to use computers to reason about increasingly complex information using background knowledge. From the dream to using triples as a currency to pay for it, this talk will illustrate the application of Semantic Web technologies for biological knowledge discovery while touching on issues in knowledge representation, RDFizing, large scale data integration and convergence with semantic web services.

Speaker Bio:
Dr. Michel Dumontier is an Associate Professor of Bioinformatics at Carleton University in the Department of Biology, Institute of Biochemistry and School of Computer Science. He is a member of both the Ottawa Institute of Systems Biology and the Ottawa-Carleton Institute for Biomedical Engineering. He is a sponsored member of the World Wide Web (W3C) Working Group on the Web Ontology Language (OWL2) and is an elected member of the OWL Experiences and Directions Workshop (OWLED) steering committee. He is an invited expert for the W3C's Semantic Web in Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG) and co-organized its 2008 Workshop on the Semantic Web in the Health Care and Life Sciences. Dr. Dumontier was an invited panellist on the "An OWL2 Far?" session at the 2008 International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), the premier conference for Semantic Web research.

Dr. Dumontier's research aims to develop a computational platform for personalized medicine, which involves biochemical knowledge representation and reasoning as well as developing efficient approaches in biochemical modeling and simulation. With over 35 research publications in workshops, conferences, and journals, his innovative research in knowledge representation, large scale data integration, distributed reasoning is creating new opportunities for pharmacogenomic oriented knowledge discovery.

You can read more about his lab here: Dumontier Lab

Looking forward to seeing you at the Meetup.