Brainstage Founder Presents at Society for Neuroscience 2007

Brainstage Founder Presents "Discovering, Integrating, and Analyzing Specific Neuroscience Research Data Using Semantic Web Technologies"

 

Pittsburgh — (Nov. 3, 2007) – Dr. Donald Doherty presented a poster on discovering, integrating, and analyzing specific neuroscience research data using semantic web technologies at the 37^th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego, CA.

The purpose of the poster is to present standard recommendations for a set of technologies known as the Semantic Web (SW) to provide a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries.    The World Wide Web standards body known as the W3C has developed such a framework. 

In his presentation, Dr. Doherty presented the W3C Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group’s demonstration of how the SW may be used to accelerate neuroscience research by making it possible for scientists to find, integrate, and analyze specific data collected from databases distributed across the Web.

“We set out to demonstrate the value of SW technologies to the neuroscientist by looking for specific genetic data and then displaying the results in an information-rich Web page,” said Dr. Doherty.  “We asked: ‘Can we find candidate genes known to be involved in signal transduction and active in pyramidal neurons’”.

In order to answer this question, knowledge in a number of biomedical databases needed to be integrated and interrogated, including morphology, signal transduction, genes, and other published data. The group carefully modeled domain knowledge to tie together the four knowledge sources and then searched them. The results were restricted to a set of 33 genes.   

 “We next demonstrated that we could visualize our results using data and tools freely available on the Web. We combined our result set with data collected and made available by the Allen Brain Institute and displayed the combined, or “mashed up,” data using the Google Maps application programming interface. The results displayed information-rich images of mouse brain slices stained for expressed genes next to details about each gene, including a visualization.”

 “The lack of standard data models and common vocabulary across neuroscience research disciplines currently slows down or blocks the sharing of knowledge. We demonstrated that SW technologies can lower or remove barriers to integrate disparate data sets. We concluded that use of SW technologies may enable neuroscientists to find, integrate, and analyze data resulting in accelerated research and discovery.”

About Brainstage

Brainstage provides a Web-based platform that helps pharmaceutical and drug research companies accelerate the drug selection process, reduce the cost of preclinical and clinical studies, and increase the overall chance of success.  Brainstage’s platform tools give instant insight into new discoveries by tapping into the real-time data flow from around the world to synthesize meaningful relationships, create visual representations, and integrate them into daily work processes.  For more information, visit http://www.brainstage.com.

About the Society for Neuroscience

The Society for Neuroscience is a nonprofit membership organization of basic scientists and physicians who study the brain and nervous system. Recognizing the field's tremendous potential, the Society was formed in 1969. It has grown from 500 members to over 38,000 and is the world's largest organization of scientists devoted to the study of the brain.  Visit http://www.sfn.org.