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The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) is one of the largest and most prestigious professional associations of its kind. Formed as the American Society of Zoologists through a 1902 merger of two societies, the Central Naturalists and the American Morphological Society, its focus has remained to integrate the many fields of specialization which occur in the broad field of biology. Throughout most of its history the society was known as the American Society of Zoologists and changed its name to the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in 1996 to reflect the scientific breadth, integrative approaches, and interests of its membership across all disciplines of biology. The SICB is organized around disciplinary divisions, each relevant to a major segment of biology.

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.

This is the homepage for an ongoing research and development project named PATIKA - Pathway Analysis Tools for Integration and Knowledge Acquisition. Within this project so far, among others, an ontology has been defined; a pathway database (which integrates and interfaces with several public pathway databases) has been constructed; and some software tools have been developed for effective integration, querying, analysis, and manipulation of pathway data.

Assuming that meaning is dependent upon the interplay between lived experience and theoretical (cultural and social) constructs, the task of this chapter in analyzing the sensemaking processes and activities which occurred during the field trip is to integrate lived experiences with theoretical constructs in such a way that the meanings generated from this integration resonate as valid for both field trip participants and informed readers. Or to paraphrase Ken Wilber,1 through the integration of subjective truthfulness and objective truth we seek mutual understanding. To achieve this end, my analysis incorporates the three strands of valid knowing (instrumental injunction, direct experience, and communal confirmation), as outlined in chapter two, and the three cultural value spheres (subjective, intersubjective, and objective domains of knowing), also outlined in chapter two, with three sensemaking themes (being there, storytelling, and living together) which emerged directly from the lived experiences of the participants during the course of the field trip.

What We Do Connectbeam is an integrated set of social software applications for information sharing and team collaboration that is packaged and delivered as a turnkey Appliance. * Social Networking * Expertise Location * Collective Intelligence How We Do It Connectbeam provides to users a social search experience that includes the following integrated features: * Social Bookmarking & Tagging * Universal Content Tagging * Central Tag Repository * Integration with Existing IT Infrastructure * Plus additional features...

Human Proteinpedia is a community portal for sharing and integration of human protein data. It allows research laboratories to contribute and maintain protein annotations. Human Protein Reference Database (HPRD) integrates data, that is deposited in Human Proteinpedia along with the existing literature curated information in the context of an individual protein. All the public data contributed to Human Proteinpedia can be queried, viewed and downloaded.

The OKKAM project aims at enabling the Web of Entities, namely a virtual space where any collection of data and information about any type of entities (e.g. people, locations, organizations, events, products, ...) published on the Web can be integrated into a single virtual, decentralized, open knowledge base

OntoWebber is a Web site management system, which facilitates the creation, generation and maintenance of Web sites. Using OntoWebber, site engineers can build site models for domain-specific Web sites. The site models are based on explicit ontologies including the domain ontology and four distinct site-modeling ontologies. Using a RDF-aware rule engine, rules can be defined to check integrity constraints on the resulting site models, thus enforcing desirable properties of the materialized Web site. Both ontologies and site models are expressed using RDF(S)/XML languages. Rules are defined in the F-logic format. The prototype system provides an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for site engineers to performed all the above tasks for managing Web sites.

Systems Biology Linker (Sybil) is a platform for the integration of BioPAX and SBML. It is part of the Virtual Cell but also a useful tool for any SBML and BioPAX integration, in other words for any one who wants to use BioPAX with an SBML-capable platform or vice versa. While Sybil can be used as an intelligent conversion tool between SBML and BioPAX, it is primarily intended for building a joint repository for SBML and BioPAX data, where links between SBML elements and BioPAX objects are maintained by SBPAX. Sybil uses SYBREAM for most of the intelligent work involved in building the SBML-SBPAX-BioPAX joint repository.

Welcome to the Social Media Classroom and Collaboratory. It's all free, as in both "freedom of speech" and "almost totally free beer." We invite you to build on what we've started to create more free value. The Social Media Classroom (we'll call it SMC) includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes-integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools. The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos. The Collaboratory (or Colab), is what we call just the web service part of it. Educators are encouraged to use the Colab and SMB materials freely, and we host your Colab communities if you don't want to install your own.

On January 07, 2009, OASIS announced the submission of a draft charter for a new OASIS Technical Committee to define an integrated collaboration object model supporting a complete range of enterprise collaboration activities. The proposed data model is based upon the Oracle Beehive Object Model (BOM), to be contributed by Oracle to the ICOM TC. The new standard model, interface, and protocol would support contextual collaboration within business processes for an integrated collaboration environment which includes communication artifacts (e.g., email, instant message, telephony, RSS), teamwork artifacts (such as project and meeting workspaces, discussion forums, real-time conferences, presence, activities, subscriptions, wikis, and blogs), content artifacts (e.g., text and multi-media contents, contextual connections, taxonomies, folksonomies, tags, recommendations, social bookmarking, saved searches), and coordination artifacts (such as address books, calendars, tasks) etc.

MnM is an annotation tool which provides both automated and semi-automated support for annotating web pages with semantic contents. MnM integrates a web browser with an ontology editor and provides open APIs to link to ontology servers and for integrating information extraction tools.

Database systems are notorious for being hard to use. It is even more difficult to integrate data from multiple sources and collaborate on large data sets with people outside your organization. Without an easy way to offer all the collaborators access to the same server, data sets get copied, emailed and ftp'd--resulting in multiple versions that get out of sync very quickly. Today we're introducing Google Fusion Tables on Labs, an experimental system for data management in the cloud. It draws on the expertise of folks within Google Research who have been studying collaboration, data integration, and user requirements from a variety of domains. Fusion Tables is not a traditional database system focusing on complicated SQL queries and transaction processing. Instead, the focus is on fusing data management and collaboration: merging multiple data sources, discussion of the data, querying, visualization, and Web publishing. We plan to iteratively add new features to the systems as we get feedback from users.

Welcome to ITIS, the Integrated Taxonomic Information System! Here you will find authoritative taxonomic information on plants, animals, fungi, and microbes of North America and the world

The exponential growth of diverse types of biological data presents the research community with an unprecedented challenge and opportunity. The challenge is to stay afloat in the flood of biological data, keeping it as accessible, up-to-date, and integrated as possible. The opportunity is to cultivate new models of data curation and exchange that take advantage of direct participation by a greater portion of the community.

The aims of clinical and translational research are to achieve a better understanding of the pathogenesis of human disease in order to develop effective diagnostic, therapeutic and prevention strategies. Biomedical informatics can play an important role in supporting this research by facilitating the management, integration, analysis and exchange of data derived from and related to the research problems being studied. A key aspect of this support is to bring clarity, rigor and formalism to the representation of 1. disease initiation, progression, pathogenesis, signs, symptoms, assessments, clinical and laboratory findings, disease diagnosis, treatment, treatment response and outcome, and 2. the interrelations between these distinct entities both in patient management and in clinical research, thus allowing the data to be more readily retrievable and shareable, and more able to serve in the support of algorithmic reasoning.

The Distributed Annotation System (DAS) defines a communication protocol used to exchange biological annotations. It is motivated by the idea that such annotations should not be provided by single centralized databases, but should instead be spread over multiple sites. Data distribution, performed by DAS servers, is separated from visualization, which is done by DAS clients. DAS is a client-server system in which a single client integrates information from multiple servers. It allows a single machine to gather up sequence annotation information from multiple distant web sites, collate the information, and display it to the user in a single view. Little coordination is needed among the various information providers. DAS is heavily used in the genome bioinformatics community. Over the last years we have also seen growing acceptance in the protein sequence and structure communities.

Panda, an open source project, will let any site owner willing to do a little coding and integration work to allow user video uploads and playback. Think YouTube in a box. The software itself is free and will run on Amazon Web Services EC2, S3 and SimpleDB. You'll have to pay for the Amazon services, but this is a nice step forward from a variety of existing paid services out there like Zencoder, SesameVault and Hey!Watch. Panda handles all aspects of uploading, transcoding and streaming, handing things off to a Flash player like JW FLV Player by default.

By integrating heterogeneous original data with uniform RDF format, creating additional ontology mappings between GO terms, and introducing a set of reasoning rulebases, we proposed a RDF model GORouter.

Rapid advances in information technologies continue to drive a flood of data and analysis techniques in ecological and environmental sciences. Using these resources more effectively and taking advantage of associated cross-disciplinary research opportunities poses a major challenge to both scientists and information technologists. These challenges are now being addressed in projects that apply knowledge representation and Semantic Web technologies to problems in discovering and integrating ecological data and data analysis techniques. In this paper, we present an overview of the major ontological components of our project, SEEK ("Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge"). We describe the concepts and models that are represented in each, and present a discussion of potential applications of these ontologies on the Semantic Web