EMBL-EBI RDF Platform
Yesterday saw the release of the EMBL-EBI RDF Platform, the official announcement can be found here. The purpose of this new platform is to act as a central resource for all RDF and Semantic Technology focused work being carried out at the EMBL-EBI. The benefit to users of the RDF version of the ChEMBL database is that you now have access to documentation, a SPARQL endpoint, example SPARQL queries and a Linked Data browser.
Other EMBL-EBI resources involved in this project include BioModels, BioSamples, Expression Atlas, Reactome and UniProt - we expect the number of resources offering RDF versions of their data to grow over the coming year.
One of the very cool things the new platform offers users is the ability to run federated SPARQL queries across the separate resources listed above. Essentially this is removing the data integration burden, which would have previously been required in order to answer the questions asked by the federated queries. Example federated SPARQL queries include:
- How are the protein targets of the gleevec drug differentially expressed and which pathways are they involved in? (Run from ChEMBL SPARQL endpoint)
- Which genes are differentially expressed in asthma, which pathways are they involved in and which compounds target them? (Run from the Gene Expression Atlas SPARQL endpoint)