W3C Launches Group Linking Medical Industry with Semantic Web

http://www.w3.org/--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 22, 2005--
Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group brings
together medical and research communities.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is launching a new interest Group
to connect medical industry verticals with Semantic Web experts in an
effort to improve collaboration, research and development, and
innovation adoption in the health care and life science industries.
The first of its kind for W3C, the Semantic Web for Health Care and
Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG) deploys standardized Semantic
Web specifications into specific services defined by a user community.

"This new venture puts W3C specifications through the paces of a
dynamic, multifaceted and interdependent set of communities," said Tim
Berners-Lee, W3C Director. "We have a remarkable opportunity to listen
to the area experts, to see how our work meets their needs, and to
serve their future requirements."

Obstacles Prevent Sharing of Related Data, Slowing Clinical Research

In both life science research communities and health services provider
settings, boundaries that inhibit data sharing limit innovation and
impede efficient care delivery. For example, data and information
produced by chemists, biologists and clinicians is often unavailable
to each other, yet the material can be of mutual benefit. To create an
infrastructure that connects and serves these diverse communities,
there is a need to both bring together the people, and ground this
work in a framework that supports semantically-rich system, process
and information interoperability.

Semantic Web Technologies Can Provide Bridge Between Chemists,
Biologists, Clinicians and other Researchers

Health care and life sciences research are rapidly evolving, and a
critical key to their success is the implementation of new informatics
models that will bridge many forms of biological and medical
information across institutions. By embedding semantics into medical
and research information, researchers will have better access to the
knowledge required to effectively find cures to diseases, make drugs
safer and more affordable, and enable health-care providers to offer
individualized clinical management to patients. Leveraging Semantic
Web technologies will help move away from trial-and-error methods and
make it easier to use molecular pathway knowledge for more effective
decision making in clinical research.

W3C Takes Step in Uniting Area Specialists with Web Technologies to
Improve Communication, Information Sharing

The HCLSIG will develop use cases that demonstrate the value to
business of adopting Semantic Web technology, core vocabularies and
ontologies, guidelines and best practices for unique identifiers. The
group will provide a forum for supporting communication, education,
collaboration and implementation. The group will also work with other
Semantic Web groups to gather suggestions for future development, and
will support and encourage the use of Semantic Web technologies and
foster the growth of interoperable, policy-aware data and databases in
the health care and life sciences industries.

W3C has brought together diverse communities -- policy makers,
technologists, researchers and linguists -- to produce the foundations
for Web technology, to tremendous effect. This history has encouraged
W3C to take an additional step with the HCLSIG into vertical
applications of Web standards.

More information is available from the W3C Semantic Web Health Care
and Life Sciences home page.

This work is managed by the W3C Technology and Society Domain and is
part of W3C's Semantic Web Activity.

About the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

The W3C was created to lead the Web to its full potential by
developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its
interoperability. It is an international industry consortium jointly
run by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
(MIT CSAIL) in the USA, the European Research Consortium for
Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) headquartered in France and Keio
University in Japan. Services provided by the Consortium include: a
repository of information about the World Wide Web for developers and
users, and various prototype and sample applications to demonstrate
use of new technology. Over 400 organizations are Members of the
Consortium. For more information see http://www.w3.org/