The W3C Semantic Web in Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG) has used RDF tools to integrate several large biological and clinical databases. This has simplified access to relational and hierarchical data and enabled third party additions to the database. HCLSIG demonstrates the use of Semantic Web technologies to access data on a web scale, taking advantage of OWL and rules to allow queries to re-purpose data without the need to coordinate with the data custodian.

This tutorial will introduce OWL and rule mappings of databases, as well as introduce good practices for data modeling and publication. The use of SKOS for terminologies will also be described. Attendees will learn possible applications of Semantic Web tools to share data between and within organizations and solve large scale data integration problems.

This tutorial will discuss how publishers of biological and clinical data can use OWL and rules to model their data and how users of Semantic Web tools can access this more diverse data. Attendees should be familiar with the Semantic Web languages RDF, Turtle, SPARQL and be introduced to OWL. These materials will be covered in the earlier RSWA tutorial.