Events & News
Colloquium
| Category | Lecture |
| Date | Thursday, November 13, 2008 |
| Time | 11:00 am |
| Location | GS 906 |
| Details | Light refreshments will be served at 10:45AM in the 9th floor atrium |
| Speaker | Dr. Sudha Ram |
| Title | McClelland Professor of MIS |
| Affiliation | Eller College of Management, University of Arizona |
Linking Biological Databases Semantically for Knowledge Discovery
Many important life sciences questions are aimed at studying the relationships and interactions between biological functions/processes and biological entities such as genes and proteins. The answers may be found by examining diverse types of biological/genomic databases. Finding these answers, however, requires accessing, and retrieving data, from diverse biological data sources. More importantly, sophisticated knowledge discovery processes involve traversing through large numbers of inherent links among various data sources. Currently, the links among data are either implemented as hyperlinks without explicitly indicating their meanings and labels, or hidden in a seemingly simple text format. Consequently, biologists spend numerous hours identifying potentially useful links and following each lead manually, which is time-consuming and error-prone. Our research is aimed at constructing semantic relationships among biological entities. We have designed a semantic model to categorize and formally define the links. By incorporating ontologies such as Gene or Sequence ontology, we propose techniques to analyze the links embedded within and among data records, to explicitly label their semantics, and to facilitate link traversal, querying, and data sharing. Users may then ask complicated and ad hoc questions and even design their own workflow to support their knowledge discovery processes. In addition, we have performed an empirical analysis to demonstrate that our method can not only improve the efficiency of querying multiple databases, but also yield more useful information.
http://adrg.eller.arizona.edu
Biography
Sudha Ram is McClelland Professor of Management Information Systems in the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona. She received a Bachelors degree in Chemistry (with Physics and Mathematics), an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.