Comments on: Semantic wikis

By: HealthCamp UK 2008 « Mohammad Al-Ubaydli’s blog

HealthCamp UK 2008 « Mohammad Al-Ubaydli’s blog — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 21:56:39 +0000

[...] attended HealthCamp Maryland back in June, had a great time and learned a huge amount. Judging by the early applications there [...]

By: Fran

Fran — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:15:14 +0000

This is a great analysis of some of the key knowledge organisation issues that crop up all over the place, but in medical information it strikes me that the problems are particularly severe. The vagueness around symptom description especially requires some very clever and flexible categorisation. Biowisdom – http://www.biowisdom.com/- have been doing some interesting things cross-linking databases and working on data visualisations.

By: VocabControl » Semantic wikis

VocabControl » Semantic wikis — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:08:22 +0000

[...] Semantic wikis is a description of how semantic technology could be used to overcome retrieval problems in large-scale resources – in this case medical information. Once we start looking at DNA there is just so much data that we have to find clever ways of organising it. An excellent post from a fascinating and highly entertaining blog that ranges over many subjects. [...]

By: Greg

Greg — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 16:09:06 +0000

Any doctor worldwide can use the SNPedia database for information – and we know there are at least a handful of doctors now who are savvy enough to – and for their own personal use. It would be great if we also got more medical students to use (and contribute to or even edit) SNPedia.

The biggest hurdle is getting the health care community up to speed on all of this. Frankly, since in the vast majority of cases the information is not (yet) useful enough to help guide diagnoses or treatment decisions, we’re anticipating that it will take some time, and most likely won’t really come together until after full genomic sequence is readily available. [Microarrays are just sampling a subset of the genome.] It will also happen sooner in countries with more progressive health care systems (like most European countries).

As to creating a report of a patient’s genome for physicians and other health care providers to use, we encourage you and others to use and help improve our existing applications. The Promethease software you saw at HealthCamp will get better and better as the user community grows and contributes suggestions.

By: cariaso

cariaso — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:58:17 +0000

Melanie Swan didn't just share her genome with me, she shared it with the whole world. So for those who are curious you can see what she learned at http://www.snpedia.com/files/promethease/outputs/genome_Karen_Jacobs_20080614070807.html In addition to the ways in which Semantic MediaWiki lets you browse your data, there are also query interfaces. Some are quite simple and designed to be embedded directly into your wiki. But for anyone who feels this can't be a 'real' database, because real databases speak SQL, you should be aware that Semantic MediaWiki can also expose a SPARQL interface which is a real standard, and extremely SQL-like. SPARQL