Grid and Semantic computing for Cancer databases

Supervision of summer undergraduate intern, Department of Computer Science, University College London, 2011

The project description is also available here.

Grid and Semantic computing for Cancer databases

Cancer researchers constantly generate, validate and interpret data. This data is likely to be distributed, use different formats, employ distinct terms for the same entity (e.g. carcinoma or tumour) or even the same term to refer to different entities (e.g. insulin may be a drug or a gene, depending on the context).

Grid computing is a networking environment where distributed computers are used cooperatively to solve a single problem that deals with large amounts of data and/or requires large computational power. Semantic web technology provides methods to represent, query and reason over data.

This project involves these two exciting and cutting-edge technologies, grid computing and semantic web, to handle cancer-related data.

The aim is to provide a way of searching distributed cancer-related databases considering the meaning of the data.

In order to achieved this goal, we have built software components that generate semantic representations of the distribute databases and support querying over these representations. This project aims at developing grid services based on these semantic components, and involves using technologies such as Java, Web Services, RDF, OWL.

Start date: ASAP after exam period

Duration: 8 - 10 weeks

Contact: Alejandra Gonzalez Beltran

Funding: CS bursary