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Poster Submissions
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FlyTED and FlyWeb - Image Management and Integration for Scientific Research
Jun Zhao, Graham Klyne and David Shotton
Image Bioinformatics Research Group, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford
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Images play vital roles in scientific studies, but without descriptive metadata image repositories risk becoming costly and meaningless data graveyards. The objective of the Image Bioinformatics Research Group at the University of Oxford is to employ Semantic and Web technologies to enhance the value of biological research data, particularly image data. To this end, we adapted EPrints (http://www.eprints.org/), a conventional repository software system, in order to publish images with structured metadata with a minimum of development effort, and we used this to create FlyTED (http://www.fly-ted.org/), a biological image repository for gene expression images from the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster, a model organism for genetic research.
To permit semantic web access to these data, we have established a SPARQL endpoint on FlyTED, whereby the image metadata becomes programmatically accessible, and have enabled the images and their metadata to be browsed using the Semantic Web faceted browser Exhibit (http://simile.mit.edu/exhibit/).
We are now developing FlyWeb (http://imageweb.zoo.ox.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/FlyWeb_project/), a demonstrator data web that will provide search interoperability across a number of heterogeneous distributed data sources concerning fruit flies, including FlyTED, FlyBase (http://flybase.org/, the global database of genomics information concerning Drosophila) and the published literature. This will involve the development of procedures for the semantic alignment of these heterogeneous published data. |
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