Knowledge Integration in Biomedicine: Technology and Community

This special issue of Briefings in Bioinformatics, on Knowledge Integration andWeb Communities, highlights a new generation of Semantic Web [1, 2] technology being used to weave together knowledge discovery in biomedicine. As such, it marks a notable point in the co-evolution of biomedicine, web technology and bioinformatics. The interaction of these three disciplines is now becoming more closely aligned than ever, and is beginning to enable new qualitative transformations in the practice of each discipline. As Neumann and Prusak note (this issue), there are now literally thousands of communities of practice in biomedical research and healthcare, knit together by the Web. These communities rely extensively upon digital resources of many kinds, in many formats, as mediators of their work. The current non-semantic web stitches these resources together at their edges. It has been left to human web navigators—mostly—to integrate the content as knowledge. Knowledge integration occurs in part through the activities of reading, comparing, evaluating, discussing, hypothesis construction, and validation, and extending . . . inevitable and irreducible activities in science. The social fabric and mediating resources for these activities have been called the knowledge ecosystem of science. To this has been added, almost organically, over the last 10–15 years, a dense web of aligned activities in bioinformatics and applied web technology, which is now beginning to include the semantic web. The essential questions for semantic web technology applied to bioscience are: