Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

March 10, 2015

NIH RFI on National Library of Medicine

Filed under: BigData,Machine Learning,Medical Informatics,NIH — Patrick Durusau @ 2:16 pm

NIH Announces Request for Information Regarding Deliberations of the Advisory Committee to the NIH Director (ACD) Working Group on the National Library of Medicine

Deadline: Friday, March 13, 2015.

Responses to this RFI must be submitted electronically to: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/rfi/rfi.cfm?ID=41.

Apologies for having missed this announcement. Perhaps the title lacked urgency? 😉

From the post:

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has issued a call for participation in a Request for Information (RFI), allowing the public to share its thoughts with the NIH Advisory Committee to the NIH Director Working Group charged with helping to chart the course of the National Library of Medicine, the world’s largest biomedical library and a component of the NIH, in preparation for recruitment of a successor to Dr. Donald A.B. Lindberg, who will retire as NLM Director at the end of March 2015.

As part of the working group’s deliberations, NIH is seeking input from stakeholders and the general public through an RFI.

Information Requested

The RFI seeks input regarding the strategic vision for the NLM to ensure that it remains an international leader in biomedical data and health information. In particular, comments are being sought regarding the current value of and future need for NLM programs, resources, research and training efforts and services (e.g., databases, software, collections). Your comments can include but are not limited to the following topics:

  • Current NLM elements that are of the most, or least, value to the research community (including biomedical, clinical, behavioral, health services, public health and historical researchers) and future capabilities that will be needed to support evolving scientific and technological activities and needs.
  • Current NLM elements that are of the most, or least, value to health professionals (e.g., those working in health care, emergency response, toxicology, environmental health and public health) and future capabilities that will be needed to enable health professionals to integrate data and knowledge from biomedical research into effective practice.
  • Current NLM elements that are of most, or least, value to patients and the public (including students, teachers and the media) and future capabilities that will be needed to ensure a trusted source for rapid dissemination of health knowledge into the public domain.
  • Current NLM elements that are of most, or least, value to other libraries, publishers, organizations, companies and individuals who use NLM data, software tools and systems in developing and providing value-added or complementary services and products and future capabilities that would facilitate the development of products and services that make use of NLM resources.
  • How NLM could be better positioned to help address the broader and growing challenges associated with:
    • Biomedical informatics, “big data” and data science;
    • Electronic health records;
    • Digital publications; or
    • Other emerging challenges/elements warranting special consideration.

If I manage to put something together, I will post it here as well as to the NIH.

Experiences with big data and machine learning, for all of the hype, have been falling short of the promised land. Not that I think topic maps/subject identity can get you there but certainly closer than wandering in the woods of dark data.

November 8, 2014

Big Data Driving Data Integration at the NIH

Filed under: BigData,Data Integration,Funding,NIH — Patrick Durusau @ 5:17 pm

Big Data Driving Data Integration at the NIH by David Linthicum.

From the post:

The National Institutes of Health announced new grants to develop big data technologies and strategies.

“The NIH multi-institute awards constitute an initial investment of nearly $32 million in fiscal year 2014 by NIH’s Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative and will support development of new software, tools and training to improve access to these data and the ability to make new discoveries using them, NIH said in its announcement of the funding.”

The grants will address issues around Big Data adoption, including:

  • Locating data and the appropriate software tools to access and analyze the information.
  • Lack of data standards, or low adoption of standards across the research community.
  • Insufficient polices to facilitate data sharing while protecting privacy.
  • Unwillingness to collaborate that limits the data’s usefulness in the research community.

Among the tasks funded is the creation of a “Perturbation Data Coordination and Integration Center.” The center will provide support for data science research that focuses on interpreting and integrating data from different data types and databases. In other words, it will make sure the data moves to where it should move, in order to provide access to information that’s needed by the research scientist. Fundamentally, it’s data integration practices and technologies.

This is very interesting from the standpoint that the movement into big data systems often drives the reevaluation, or even new interest in data integration. As the data becomes strategically important, the need to provide core integration services becomes even more important.

…

The NIH announcement. NIH invests almost $32 million to increase utility of biomedical research data, reads in part:

Wide-ranging National Institutes of Health grants announced today will develop new strategies to analyze and leverage the explosion of increasingly complex biomedical data sets, often referred to as Big Data. These NIH multi-institute awards constitute an initial investment of nearly $32 million in fiscal year 2014 by NIH’s Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative, which is projected to have a total investment of nearly $656 million through 2020, pending available funds.

With the advent of transformative technologies for biomedical research, such as DNA sequencing and imaging, biomedical data generation is exceeding researchers’ ability to capitalize on the data. The BD2K awards will support the development of new approaches, software, tools, and training programs to improve access to these data and the ability to make new discoveries using them. Investigators hope to explore novel analytics to mine large amounts of data, while protecting privacy, for eventual application to improving human health. Examples include an improved ability to predict who is at increased risk for breast cancer, heart attack and other diseases and condition, and better ways to treat and prevent them.

And of particular interest:

BD2K Data Discovery Index Coordination Consortium (DDICC). This program will create a consortium to begin a community-based development of a biomedical data discovery index that will enable discovery, access and citation of biomedical research data sets.

Big data driving data integration. Who knew? 😉

The more big data the greater the pressure for robust data integration.

Sounds like they are playing the topic maps tune.

April 30, 2012

NSF, NIH to Hold Webinar on Big Data Solicitation

Filed under: Funding,NIH,NSF,Research Methods — Patrick Durusau @ 3:17 pm

NSF, NIH to Hold Webinar on Big Data Solicitation by Erwin Gianchandani.

Guidance on BIGDATA Solicitation

<= $25 Million Webinar: Tuesday, May 8th, from 11am to 12pm ET. Registration closes 11:59pm PDT on Monday, May 7th.

From the post:

Late last month, the Administration unveiled a $200 million Big Data R&D Initiative, committing new funding to improve “our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data.” The initiative includes a joint solicitation by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH), providing up to $25 million for Core Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Big Data Science and Engineering (BIGDATA). Now NSF and NIH have announced a webinar “to describe the goals and focus of the BIGDATA solicitation, help investigators understand its scope, and answer any questions potential Principal Investigators (PIs) may have.” The webinar will take place next week — on Tuesday, May 8th, from 11am to 12pm ET.

So, how clever are you really?

(The post has links to other materials you probably need to read before the webinar.)

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