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There is a growing community interest in applying Semantic Web and Web 2.0 technologies in health care and life sciences areas including the Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG ; http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/hcls/) and Medicine 2.0 (http://www.medicine20congress.com/). This has motivated us to explore how to intersect these two sets of technologies in the context of the HCLS Knowledge Base (KB).

, the government should be a rule-setting referee to encourage the development of an open software platform on which innovators could write electronic health record applications.

Every hour, HealthMap, an infectious disease-tracking Web site, culls through news Web sites, public health list servs, the World Health Organization's online pages, and other Web sites in six different languages to pinpoint outbreaks of disease that real-world doctors can then act on.

Supercourse is a repository of lectures on global health and prevention designed to improve the teaching of prevention. Supercourse has a network of over 55000 scientists in 174 countries who are sharing for free a library of 3557 lectures in 26 languages.

An international research consortium has been formed to create the most detailed and medically useful picture to date of human genetic variation. The 1000 Genomes Project will involve sequencing the genomes of at least a thousand people from around the world. The project will receive major support from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, England, the Beijing Genomics Institute Shenzhen in China and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

"The Institute of the Future will soon be launching what it calls the first massively multiplayer forecast game, billed as The Superstruct Game. According to the game's FAQ, the idea is to 'imagine how we might solve the problems we'll face.' Interestingly, the game itself is meant to be played 'on forums, blogs, videos, wikis, and other familiar online spaces.' From the IFTF website's sneak peak, the game is set in the year 2019, where the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has forecast the possibility of human extinction by the year 2042 as the result of five simultaneous 'super-threats:' Quarantine, which is a result from 'declining health and pandemic disease;' Ravenous, which relates to the global collapse of the world food system; Power Struggle, related to the flux of power 'as nations fight for energy supremacy and the world searches for alternative energy solutions;' Outlaw Planet, covering increased surveillance and loss of liberties; and, lastly, Generation Exile, which covers the massive increase in refugees."

DIYbio is an organization for the ever expanding community of citizen scientists and DIY biological engineers that value openness & responsibility. DIYbio aims to be an "Institution for the Amateur" -- an umbrella organization that provides some of the same resources afforded by more traditional institutions like academia and industry, such as access to a community of experts, to technical literature and other resources, to responsible oversight for health and safety, and an interface between the community and the public at large.

Current global disease control focuses almost exclusively on responding to epidemics after they have already spread globally. Nevertheless, dramatic failures in such pandemic control, such as the ongoing lack of success in HIV vaccine development twenty-five years into the pandemic, have shown that this wait-and-respond approach is not sufficient, and that the development of systems to prevent novel pandemics before they are established should be considered a human health imperative. Had we had such systems in place thirty years ago we may have averted the HIV pandemic.

BiOS is a response to inequities in food security, nutrition, health, natural resource management and energy. Our goal is to democratise problem solving to enable diverse solutions through decentralised innovation. Open Source We promote an innovation paradigm that focuses on a distinction between the tools of innovation and the products. We promote licenses that couple rights with responsibilities to foster efficient development, improvement, sharing and use of technology. Open Science We create and share new biological enabling technologies and platforms that can be used to deliver innovations. We develop new licensing and distributive collaboration mechanisms that have resonance with the open source software movement, but are tailored for biological innovation. Open Society We enhance the transparency, accessibility and capability to use all the tools of science, whether patented, open access or public domain.

The prototype we describe is a biomedical knowledge base, constructed for a demonstration at Banff WWW2007 , that integrates 15 distinct data sources using currently available Semantic Web technologies such as the W3C standard Web Ontology Language [OWL] and Resource Description Framework [RDF]. This report outlines which resources were integrated, how the knowledge base was constructed using free and open source triple store technology, how it can be queried using the W3C Recommended RDF query language SPARQL [SPARQL], and what resources and inferences are involved in answering complex queries. While the utility of the knowledge base is illustrated by identifying a set of genes involved in Alzheimer's Disease, the approach described here can be applied to any use case that integrates data from multiple domains.

HealthMap Global disease alert map

You'd think being seriously wounded on the battlefield would be the most painful thing a soldier could go through, but the recovery from burns can take months of agonizing physical therapy that prolongs the suffering. In some cases, healing can be more painful than the original trauma. What if you could take patients away from their immediate surroundings when cleaning their burns or stretching the skin during physical therapy? A virtual reality game created to help patients deal with pain hopes to do just that.

The OpenKnowledge team responded to the UK's Grand Challenge Project for information-driven healthcare with a proposal to "completely change the way patients view the management of their healthcare pathways."