An existence proof of the kind of research articles we might have if all the current semantic tools we applied. And a description of the work involved.

Concise description of the simple ideas behind the phrase "semantic web".

Rod Page's thoughts on how to jump-start linked biodiversity data.

Motivation: For many years, the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) semantic network (SN) has been used as an upper-level semantic framework for the categorization of terms from terminological resources in biomedicine. BioTop has recently been developed as an upper-level ontology for the biomedical domain. In contrast to the SN, it is founded upon strict ontological principles, using OWL DL as a formal representation language, which has become standard in the semantic Web. In order to make logic-based reasoning available for the resources annotated or categorized with the SN, a mapping ontology was developed aligning the SN with BioTop. Methods: The theoretical foundations and the practical realization of the alignment are being described, with a focus on the design decisions taken, the problems encountered and the adaptations of BioTop that became necessary. For evaluation purposes, UMLS concept pairs obtained from MEDLINE abstracts by a named entity recognition system were tested for possible semantic relationships. Furthermore, all semantic-type combinations that occur in the UMLS Metathesaurus were checked for satisfiability. Results: The effort-intensive alignment process required major design changes and enhancements of BioTop and brought up several design errors that could be fixed. A comparison between a human curator and the ontology yielded only a low agreement. Ontology reasoning was also used to successfully identify 133 inconsistent semantic-type combinations. Availability: BioTop, the OWL DL representation of the UMLS SN, and the mapping ontology are available at http://www.purl.org/biotop/.

DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) provides Web-based systems for biological analysis, called Web APIs for biology (WABI). So far, we have developed over 20 SOAP services and several workflows that consist of a series of method invocations. In this article, we present newly developed services of WABI, that is, REST-based Web services, additional workflows and a workflow navigation system. Each Web service and workflow can be used as a complete service or a building block for programmers to construct more complex information processing systems. The workflow navigation system aims to help non-programming biologists perform analysis tasks by providing next applicable services on Web browsers according to the output of a previously selected service. With this function, users can apply multiple services consecutively only by following links without any programming or manual copy-and-paste operations on Web browsers. The listed services are determined automatically by the system referring to the dictionaries of service categories, the input/output types of services and HTML tags. WABI and the workflow navigation system are freely accessible at http://www.xml.nig.ac.jp/index.html and http://cyclamen.ddbj.nig.ac.jp/, respectively.