Establishing a distributed system for the simple representation and integration of diverse scientific assertions

Abstract

Information technology has the potential to increase the pace of scientific progress by helping researchers in formulating, publishing and finding information. There are numerous projects that employ ontologies and Semantic Web technologies towards this goal. However, the number of applications that have found widespread use among biomedical researchers is still surprisingly small. In this paper we present the aTag (¿associative tags¿) convention, which aims to drastically lower the entry barriers to the biomedical Semantic Web. aTags are short snippets of HTML+RDFa with embedded RDF/OWL based on the Semantically Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) vocabulary and domain ontologies and taxonomies, such as the Open Biomedical Ontologies and DBpedia. The structure of aTags is very simple: a short piece of human-readable text that is ¿tagged¿ with relevant ontological entities. This paper describes our efforts for seeding the creation of a viable ecosystem of datasets, tools and services around aTags.