Bringing Neuroscience to the Semantic Web: The Semantic Synapse Project

Neuroscientific research is increasingly hampered by the way scientific data and information is stored and communicated. Information is often presented in forms that are hardly machine processable and different information sources are poorly connected. The semantic synapse project aims to adapt semantic Web technologies to overcome these problems in neuroscientific research, focussing on a field of outstanding biological and medical importance: the neuronal synapse. An extensive set of ontologies about synaptic function is built through the analysis of neuroscientific literature and the conversion of existing databases into the Web ontology language (OWL). Neuro scientists will be given the ability to formulate and share their findings about synaptic function based on these ontologies. Existing semantic Web crawlers will be used to search the Internet for newly created ontologies relevant to the subject. A central Web portal gives researchers the ability to query and visualize the harvested information through a single interface