The CTSAconnect Consoritum was awarded an 18-month contract from Booz Allen Hamilton and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) to begin work on the CTSAconnect project. This project addresses the problem of information fragmentation by creating an Integrated Semantic Framework (ISF) that facilitates the production and consumption of publicly available Linked Open Data (LOD; see http://linkeddata.org/) about investigators, physicians, biomedical research resources, services, and clinical activities.

LOD refers to data that has been given a specific Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), for the purpose of sharing and linking data and information on the Semantic Web. While a large amount of data is published as LOD, there remains a significant gap in the representation of research resources and clinical expertise. Reseachers can be characterized by the organization to which they belong, the grants and research in which they have participated, the research topics and research resources (reagents, biospecimens, animal models) they have generated, as well as the publications they have (co)-authored. Clinician profiles on the other hand, can be defined by their credentials, clinical research topics, and the kinds of procedures and specialization that can be inferred from clinical encounter data. We believe that integrating and relating this diversity of information sources and platforms requires addressing the overlap between research resources and the attributes and activities of researchers and clinicians.

CTSAconnect aims to promote integration and discovery of research activities, resources, and clinical expertise. To this end, we will publish our ontologies and LOD via our website, which will also illustrate repeatable methods and examples of how to extract, consume, and utilize this valuable new LOD using freely available tools like VIVO, eagle-i, and Google APIs.

The CTSAconnect Consoritum was awarded an 18-month contract from Booz Allen Hamilton and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) to begin work on the CTSAconnect project. This project addresses the problem of information fragmentation by creating an Integrated Semantic Framework (ISF) that facilitates the production and consumption of publicly available Linked Open Data (LOD; see http://linkeddata.org/) about investigators, physicians, biomedical research resources, services, and clinical activities.

LOD refers to data that has been given a specific Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), for the purpose of sharing and linking data and information on the Semantic Web. While a large amount of data is published as LOD, there remains a significant gap in the representation of research resources and clinical expertise. Reseachers can be characterized by the organization to which they belong, the grants and research in which they have participated, the research topics and research resources (reagents, biospecimens, animal models) they have generated, as well as the publications they have (co)-authored. Clinician profiles on the other hand, can be defined by their credentials, clinical research topics, and the kinds of procedures and specialization that can be inferred from clinical encounter data. We believe that integrating and relating this diversity of information sources and platforms requires addressing the overlap between research resources and the attributes and activities of researchers and clinicians.

CTSAconnect aims to promote integration and discovery of research activities, resources, and clinical expertise. To this end, we will publish our ontologies and LOD via our website, which will also illustrate repeatable methods and examples of how to extract, consume, and utilize this valuable new LOD using freely available tools like VIVO, eagle-i, and Google APIs.