By Ted Slater, Merck & Co., and Joanne
Luciano, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Researchers in healthcare and life sciences are reminded
every day that theirs is fundamentally an information
science. Success depends on the ability to use what is known
about patients, their diseases, and their treatments to
discover new knowledge in order to improve patient outcomes
and advance human health. Despite this realization, the
laments have been the same for years: too much data, and no
way to interpret them. The traditional tools of
bioinformatics, relying mostly on statistics and data
integration ("putting everything in one place"), have proven
to be insufficient to the task of telling us what it all
means. Our best hope for true innovation in working with
these data is to make them discoverable, interoperable, and
meaningful, and provide the means by which to analyze and
interpret them.
CSHALS (pronounced "sea shalls"), the
Conference on Semantics in Healthcare and Life Sciences,
focuses on two emerging and rapidly-growing areas that hold
enormous promise for the critical information problems in
this domain: semantic technologies, which are concerned with
the meaning of data and how to exploit it; and data science
(or "big data"), which is about very large, heterogeneous,
and often distributed datasets. Semantic technologies, and
the Semantic Web in particular, are obviating the data
integration problem by making data interoperable, so that we
can work with them as they are, wherever they are. Data
science is showing us what to do with those huge data sets
once we have managed to represent them correctly.
For
the four years since its inception, CSHALS has been the
premier event focused on the practical use of semantic
technologies in the pharmaceutical industry, including
hospitals, healthcare institutions, and research
laboratories. The conference has featured stellar keynote
talks from thought leaders in semantic technologies,
including Tim Berners-Lee, and has showcased the work of the
best researchers in this field. Conference sessions have
typically been followed by brief panel discussions with
audience participation. The conference has been preceded by
tutorials to help attendees become familiar with semantic
technologies, and in 2011 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
(RPI) offered a popular hands-on introduction to the
Semantic Web and Linked Data. In addition, commercial
vendors with relevant offerings can provide brief "tech
talks" to keep attendees informed.
Also in 2011, the
scope of CSHALS began to include data science in addition to
semantic technologies with a keynote presentation by Toby
Segaran, author and software engineer at Google. In 2012,
CSHALS will continue to expand with even more content from
this exciting field. The CSHALS Organizing Committee
believes that semantic technologies and data science provide
the most compelling path forward for handling the vast
amount of complex, heterogeneous data in healthcare and life
sciences, and are committed to bringing the most inspiring
thought leaders and the best practitioners in these areas
together for the benefit of all CSHALS attendees.
Semantic technologies and big data are the future of
information handling in healthcare and life sciences.
Consider CSHALS 2012 in your February plans next year!
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