Open PHACTS Foundation

Press Release: OpenLink Software joins the Open PHACTS project

Home »  News »  Press Releases »  Press Release: OpenLink Software joins the Open PHACTS project

Press Release: OpenLink Software joins the Open PHACTS project

On September 13, 2012, Posted by , In Press Releases, By ,, , With Comments Off on Press Release: OpenLink Software joins the Open PHACTS project

(PDFCambridge, UK – The Open PHACTS consortium is pleased to announce a new project partner. OpenLink Software has been selected to be the Linked Data hosting provider for the online Open PHACTS platform, leveraging its well known experience in hosting high-performance and scalable linked data spaces via its Virtuoso platform for multi-model data management and integration.

The Open PHACTS consortium is building a freely available platform, integrating pharmacological data from a variety of information resources, and providing tools and services to interpret this integrated data to support pharmacological research.

Currently, pharmaceutical companies expend significant and duplicated efforts aligning and integrating internal information with public data sources. This process is difficult and inefficient and the vast majority of drug discovery sources cannot easily interoperate. Open PHACTS is creating a precompetitive infrastructure, making it available both to industry and also to academia and smaller companies, who have historically not had access to large-scale integrated pharmacological data resources.

“OpenLink is one of the best recognized brands in the RDF based Linked Data management space, its pedigree is inextricably linked with the very beginning of the Linked Open Data community as demonstrated by its prevalence across the entire cloud, starting with DBpedia.” said Orri Erling, Virtuoso Program Manager, at OpenLink Software. “We are excited about participation in this project having worked on conversion of many of the original bio-science datasets in RDF-based linked data, which we still host, and are keen to see the Open PHACTS Platform sustained beyond the end of the project in the form of a DBpedia-like service for the global pharmacological community,” he added.

“Exposing the Web’s Linked Data dimension to the pharmaceuticals industry has profound positive effects globally,” said Kingsley Idehen, Founder & CEO, OpenLink Software. “Replicating the DBpedia and Linked Open Data cloud models, courtesy of Virtuoso’s performance, scalability, security features places this consortium project in a unique industry and technology leadership position,” he added.

About OpenLink Software

OpenLink Software, is a leading technology innovator and enabler of the Semantic Web, with strengths in universal platform, protocol, schema and data access, transformation, hosting, and management. OpenLink’s product lines include: the flagship high-performance and secure Virtuoso Universal Server for integrating and managing multiple protocols, Web services and data sources; Virtuoso Sponger for transforming all varieties of data forms to RDF; OpenLink Data Spaces (ODS) for integrating all forms of collaborative Web apps while exposing them through a single Semantic Web interface; the comprehensive OpenLink Ajax Toolkit (OAT), and related database drivers and middleware. Both commercial and open source versions are available.

OpenLink Software has extensive experience in RDF data management and operating of many popular Linked Data web services, and is one of the best recognized brands in the RDF data management space and is committed to maintaining long term leadership in this field.

About Open PHACTS

Open PHACTS is a 3-year knowledge management project of the Innovative Medicines Initiative, running from March 2011, and will deliver a sustainable service to continue after the project funding ends. The project consortium consists of leading academics in semantics, pharmacology and informatics, driven by solid industry business requirements: 28 partners, including 9 pharmaceutical companies and 4 biotechs. The project is on track, with a public prototype release scheduled for Autumn 2012.

This project has received support from the Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking under grant agreement n° 115191, resources of which are composed of financial contribution from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) and EFPIA companies’ in kind contribution. www.imi.europa.eu

Comments are closed.