EMBnet.journal

Open_PHACTS and NanoPublications

Christine Chichester

Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, CALIPHO group, Geneva, Switzerland

Christine Chichester belongs to the CALIPHO group at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and is the co-leader of the work package dealing with the data in the Open PHACTS platform. Open PHACTS project is a unique public-private partnership, established by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), between the European Community European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA). The goal is to provide a platform that will support key drug discovery tasks by the integration of pharmacological and other biomedical data using open standards such as RDF.

Christine earned her PhD in Molecular Pharmacology (University of California, Davis) and has since expanded her skills by working many years in the Bioinformatics domain. She is now attempting to establish discussions between the Bioinformatics and Semantic Web communities principally through data modeling and data integration projects.

This tutorial is an introduction to the Open PHACTS platform and API tailored to the wide community of potential data providers, data consumers, and service providers. The tutorial will include an overview of the Open PHACTS architecture, data sources, and example applications followed by a hands-on session detailing the use of the API.

The session will include discussions concerned with signing up for a developer API key, making API calls, and the data returned. Secondly, the tutorial will also include some discussion on the modeling of scientific assertions as nanopublications and their use within the Open PHACTS platform.