BISEL

The objective of Sealife is the conception and realisation of a semantic Grid browser for the Life Sciences, which will link the existing Web to the currently emerging eScience infrastructure. The Sealife browser will allow users to automatically link a host of Web servers and Web/Grid services to the Web content he/she is visiting. This will be accomplished using eScience's growing number of Web/Grid Services and its XML-based standards and ontologies. The browser will 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 browser will offer a new dimension of context-based information integration.

Here at the Department of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University, together with collaborators from the Mouse Atlas project at the MRC Human Genetics Unit, we are responsible for the semantically driven composition of services and the development and evaluation of Mouse Atlas-related use cases. SEALIFE started on 1 April 2006. We have developed two systems which are outlined below.

The GGAPS System assists Biologists and Bioinformaticians to plan and execute bioinformatics workflows online. The system takes bioinformatics resource and determines the available online processes that the resource can be submitted to. It then suggests possible workflows to achieve goals of interest to the biologist. The user selects a workflow and the system automatically executes it using the resource selected by the user and the appropriate online processes.

The Argumentation System assists Biologists and Bioinformaticians in resolving conflicts between online gene expression databases on whether or not genes are expressed in particular tissues. The Edinburgh Mouse Atlas Gene Expression (EMAGE) database, Gene Expression Database (GXD) and Mouse Atlas of Gene Expression database (SAGE) are the basis of the use case for current iteration of the system.

Links to papers, posters and deliverable reports generated by the Edinburgh team in the SEALIFE project can be seen on the Publications page.

Click on the link below to visit the SEALIFE Project website:
http://www.biotec.tu-dresden.de/sealife

Biomedical Informatics Systems Engineering Laboratory