Conference on Semantics in Healthcare and Life Sciences (CSHALS)

Technical Talks

Updated February 02, 2012

Tech Talks showcase products and services of relevance to the CSHALS audience. Each Tech Talk is 10 minutes in length and designed to allow organizations to create awareness of new technologies, services, etc., in an informational presentation format.

For organizations interested in presenting a Tech Talk, please go to our Sponsor Opportunities page (click here) for further information.


Thursday, February 23
11:20 am - 11:40 am

Jans Aasman, Franz Inc.
Oakland, CA, US

Javascript - The Key to Successful SemWeb Deployments

Ideally, declarative query languages (ie SQL, SPARQL) would be so powerful that we would never need to perform any procedural server side programming in the database. However, the reality is that every Enterprise application backed by a relational database relies heavily on server side programming language link PL/SQL or a very vendor specific binding to Java/C++.

Currently, the W3C nor the Semantic Web community have a proposal for server side scripting languages or named services and from our view in the trenches we see that Javascript has all the right properties to be both this scripting language and the basis for named services.

During this presentation we will demonstrate our Javascript compiler and a Javascript library that can perform all the basic handling of RDF quads, indices, and databases. This server side Javascript can also include SPARQL and Prolog and has rich functionality for temporal and spatial functions and can be used to write graph based algorithms that will work at server speed.

MongoDB’s wide adoption has created a large demand for working with JSON objects.  Our proposed library supports the MongoDB API to make working with JSON objects in combination with RDF nearly transparent. On top of all this, we can take any server defined program or function and make it instantly available as a REST call which instantly opens the Semantic Web to a host of programming talent.

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Thursday, February 23
11:45 pm - 12:05 pm

Bryan Thompson, SYSTAP LLC.
Greensboro, NC USA

Managing Bigdata® in Bioinformatics

Bigdata® is a horizontally scaled open source semantic web database platform running on a single machine or a cluster.  I will introduce the bigdata architecture, summarize some of its key differentiators and new features, including analytic query support, and show how different groups are using Bigdata® to tackle bioinformatics problems.

SYSTAP, LLC leads the development of the bigdata open source platform and offers consulting services related scalable information architectures and services and support for the bigdata platform. Bigdata® is available under both open source and OEM licenses.


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