Semantic e-Science

The Semantic Web has been a very important development in how knowledge is disseminated and manipulated on the Web, but it has been of particular importance to the flow of scientific knowledge, and will continue to shape how data is stored and accessed in a broad range of disciplines, including life sciences, earth science, materials science, and the social sciences. After first presenting papers on the foundations of semantic e-science, including papers on scientific knowledge acquisition, data integration, and workflow, this volume looks at the state of the art in each of the above-mentioned disciplines, presenting research on semantic web applications in the life, earth, materials, and social sciences. Drawing papers from three semantic web workshops, as well as papers from several invited contributors, this volume illustrates how far semantic web applications have come in helping to manage scientific information flow.

Huajun Chen received his B.S. from the Department of Biochemical Engineering, and Ph.D. from the College of Computer Science, both from Zhejiang University. At present, he serves as an associate professor in the college of computer science at Zheijiang University and was a visiting researcher at the school of computer science, Carnegie Mellon University. He is currently working for the China 973 "Semantic Grid" initiative and the leader of the e-Science DartGrid semantic grid project.

Yimin Wang is an associate information consultant in Lilly Singapore Centre for Drug Discovery. He is currently leading projects related to Semantic Web R&D in the division of Integrative Computational Science to support drug discovery research. Before joining Lilly Singapore, he was a research associate at the University of Karlsruhe, Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods (AIFB). He received his MS in 2005 after studying Advanced Computer Science in the Medical Informatics Group at University of Manchester, supervised by Prof. Alan Rector.

Dr. Kei Cheung is an Associate Professor at the Yale Center for Medical Informatics. He received his PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Connecticut. Since his PhD graduation, Dr. Cheung has been a faculty member at the Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Cheung has a joint appointment with the Computer Science Department and Genetics Department at Yale. Dr. Cheung’s primary research interest lies in the area of bioinformatics database and tool integration. Recently, he has embarked on the exploration of Semantic Web in the context of Life Sciences (including Neuroscience) data and tool integration. Dr. Cheung edited Semantic Web: Revolutionizing Knowledge Discovery in the Life Sciences (Springer) and served as the chair of the First International Workshop on Health Care and Life Sciences Data Integrationfor the Semantic Web, which was held cooperatively with the WWW2007 conference. He was he Guest Editor of the Special Issue: "Semantic BioMed Mashup", Journal of Biomedical Informatics. Dr. Cheung is also an invited expert to the Semantic Web Health Care and Life Science Interest Group launched by the World Wide Web Consortium.