The Idea
After being urged by Juan, the main organizer of the Linked Data-a-thon, we seriously thought about participating. Coming up with an idea for a cool application that could also be developed in only a few hours turned out to be a minor challenge. However, we remembered one of the demo queries of our SQUIN service. This query asks for traditional Chinese medicine as an alternative to the western drug Varenicline. Answering this queries requires data from at least three different linked datasets provided by the Linking Open Drug Data (LODD) project. Hence, this query demonstrates the added value of interlinking data from multiple sources on the Web. Furthermore, the query gives a glimpse of how ordinary people may benefit from openly available data. For this reason we agreed to build a simple application around this query and let users vary the drug for which the alternatives are to be found. Since answering only one type of questions is quite boring we decided to add some functionality that enable users to drill a bit deeper into the data that is available. Based on our knowledge of the LODD datasets we came up with the idea of adding value to the search results by allowing users to inspect possible side effects of the alternative medicines. This valuable functionality would require the evaluation of data from at least two additional datasets and, by using SQUIN, it would be realizable with only one additional type of SPARQL queries.
