Mission
To enable an open collaborative environment to jointly address the challenges associated with high volume scholarly and professional data production, storage, interoperability and analyses for knowledge discovery.Declaration
The generation of large and ever-growing amounts of data and information is rapidly becoming a problem for efficient and effective knowledge communication. Currently, life science information in databases and unstructured text is already estimated to exceed 100 million page-equivalents, and increasing with an estimated 6 million page-equivalents per year, if only restricted to mainstream peer reviewed literature.
The field needs methodologies to make massive data interoperable, non-ambiguous, non-redundant and accessible for life science research. Semantically rich triples in formats adhering to current leading semantic web standards, such as RDF and OWL are crucial elements to achieve this goal and to enable improved methodologies for knowledge discovery. Ideally, triples representing Concept-Relation-Concept ‘facts’ of curated, observational and hypothetical connections form a dynamic Concept Web.
When captured in Concept-Relation-Concept ‘triples’, the current data and information already exceeds 20 x 109 triples and this number will dramatically increase when more sources, including high throughput gene expression and sequencing data as well as biobanks will be included. Managing this amount of triples and optimally extracting the knowledge within, requires broad international collaboration in order to be effective.
Therefore, today, on May 8th, 2009, a group of representatives from academia as well as from the private sector have established the Concept Web Alliance with the aim of addressing the following:
- The advocacy and co-ordination of co-operative efforts, including where appropriate with established entities, to develop methodology and infrastructure to deal with global life science information
- The promotion of, and engagement in, research on concept identification, unique identifier assignment, and community annotation of concepts
- The development and refinement of ways to capture information in Semantically Rich Triples
- The methodology to enable universal operability and interoperability of such triples
- The needs for storage and easy (e.g. high bandwidth) access to triple collections
- The development of methods and technology – ‘concept web browsers’ – for visualizing, and reasoning with, large amounts of triples
- The support of environments for ontology or concept map building based on subsets of triples
The Concept Web Alliance is meant to be a trusted, not for profit collaboration. In the coming months an appropriate governance structure and sustainability model will be put in place.