SeaLife
SeaLife - Building a semantic grid browser for the life sciences
SeaLife is aimed at infectious disease professionals, researchers in bio-informatics, eHealth, text mining and ontologies.
The aim of the SeaLife project was to investigate a Semantic Grid Browser for the Life Sciences applied to the study of infectious diseases. The main project partners were:
- Michael Schroeder, Biotec, TU Dresden, Germany
- Albert Burger, Dept. of Computing, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK
- Patty Kostkova, City eHealth Research Center, City University, London, UK
- Robert Stevens, BioHealth Informatics Group, University of Manchester, UK
- Bianca Habermann, Scionics, Dresden, Germany
- Khaled Khelif, Inria Sophia-Antipolis, France
- The late Rose Dieng-Kuntz, Acacia research group, Inria Sophia-Antipolis, France
Aims & Objectives
The objective of SeaLife was the conception and realisation of a Semantic Grid browser for the Life Sciences, linking the existing Web to the currently emerging eScience infrastructure. The suite of browsers developed for Sealife allow users to automatically link a host of Web servers and Web/Grid services to the Web content he/she is visiting. This was accomplished using eScience's growing number of Web/Grid Services and its XML-based standards and ontologies. The browsers identify terms in the pages being browsed through the background knowledge held in ontologies. Through the use of Semantic Hyperlinks, which link identified ontology terms to servers and services, the Sealife browsers offer a new dimension of context-based information integration.
Funding & Schedule
SeaLife was funded by the European Commission under the Sixth Framework Programme, Priority 2, Information Society Technologies. The total project cost was 2.6 Million Euros with the EC providing 2.2 Million Euros, and the project partners contributing 0.4 Million Euros. The project started in April 2006 and ended in March 2009.
In June 2009, CeRC hosted the final review meeting of the very successful project, described by the reviewers as a "flagship project" in their final address to the team.
Impact
The Sealife project has made a substantial impact on research, with more than 150 publications. CeRC authored or co-authored several of the most important of these, most recently an article currently in press at the high-impact journal BMC Bioinformatics on a ground-breaking evaluation of the Sealife browsers which CeRC conducted here at City.
Sealife also continues to make an impact on industry as CeRC collaborates with the WHO and the ECDC. The ECDC is also in collaboration with our Dresden partners' spinoff company Transinsight, which develops and markets the Sealife browser GoPubMed, and which was selected as a national beacon project by the German ministry for economic affairs. Sealife also structured technology transfer through an advisory board comprising companies such as Pfizer, Unilever, and AstraZeneca, as well as the World Wide Web Consortium, and research and public organizations such as the MRC and the Canadian Health Agency. Our partners in Manchester have recently been in meetings with the Scottish government civil service about the use of the technologies they developed for Sealife, and have contributed to international standards for Semantic Web technologies through the SKOS working group of the World Wide Web Consortium.
Staff
The following members of CeRC worked on the SeaLife project:
- Dr Patty Kostkova, Head of CeRC
- Gawesh Jawaheer, Research Fellow * Helen Oliver, Research Assistant
- Ed de Quincey, Research Fellow
- Dr Gayo Diallo, Post Doctoral Research Assistant
- Faiza Hansraj, Research Assistant / Information Scientist
Visit the SeaLife project website for more information.