Semantic Data Integration For Free With IO Informatics’ Knowledge Explorer Personal Edition
From the post:
Bioinformatics software provider IO Informatics recently released its free Knowledge Explorer Personal Edition. Version 3.6 of the Personal Edition can handle most of what Knowledge Explorer Professional 3.6, launched in October, can, but it does all its work in memory without direct connectivity to a back-end database.
“In particular, a lot of the strengths of Knowledge Explorer have to do with modeling data as RDF and then testing queries, visualizing and browsing the data to see that you have the ontologies and data mappings you need for your integration and application requirements.” says Robert Stanley, IO Informatics president and CEO. The Personal version is aimed at academic experts focused on data integration and semantic data modeling, as well as personal power users in life sciences and other data-intensive industries, or anyone who wants to learn the tool in anticipation of leveraging their enterprise data sets for collaboration and integration projects.
The latest Knowledge Explorer 3.6 feature set extends the thesaurus application in the product, so that users can bring in additional thesauri and vocabularies, as well as the user interaction options for importing, merging and modifying ontologies. For the Pro edition, IO Informatics has also been working with database vendors to increase query speed and loading.
I am not sure what we did collectively to merit presents so early in the holiday seasons but I won’t spend a lot of time worrying about it.
Particularly interested in the “…additional thesauri and vocabularies…” aspect of the software. In part because it isn’t that big a step to a topic map to add in which could help provide context and other factors to better enable integration of information.
Oh, and from further down on the webpage:
Stanley sees a number of potential applications for those who might like to try the Personal version for integrating and modeling smaller data sets. “Maybe a customer has a number of reports on protein expression experiments and lot of clinical data associated with that, including healthcare records and various report spreadsheets, and they must integrate those to do some research for themselves or their internal customers,” he says, as one example. “You can do that even using the Personal version to create a well integrated, semantically formatted file.”
Sure and when researchers move on, how do their successors maintain those integrations? Inquiring minds want to know? What do we do about semantic rot?