On April 4, 2017 we held our third BDE webinar for Societal Challenge 1: Health. The goal of this webinar was to present the progress we’ve made on our pilot project in this area, our plans for the near future, and for the BDE community and public to ask any questions they may have about the pilot. 22 people attended this hangout.
Ronald Siebes (VU University Amsterdam) started the seminar by introducing the BDE project and the seven Horizon 2020 Societal Challenges. He gave an overview of the pilot projects in each area, the kinds of data they are working with, and the kinds of problems they aim to solve.
Next Hajira Jabeen (University of Bonn) gave a more detailed explanation of the architecture of the BDE infrastructure, and its flexibility in addressing different kinds of big data challenges. The BDE infrastructure is open source, and designed to make it simple for anyone to get started working with big data; Hajira explained how it can be set up and integrated with custom components to suit different use cases.
Nick Lynch, CTO of the Open PHACTS Foundation, then presented more detailed information about the SC1 pilot and its progress. Last year we successfully completed the first phase of this pilot, replicating the functionality of the Open PHACTS Discovery Platform on the BDE infrastructure. The Open PHACTS Discovery Platform brings together pharmacological data resources in an integrated, interoperable infrastructure, and has been developed to reduce barriers to drug discovery for industry, academia, and small businesses.
Nick also gave an overview of how individual users can set up and use the Open PHACTS Discovery Platform on their local machine or network. Our plans for the next stage of the pilot involve updating and refreshing the data integrated by the platform, and updating the API as part of a wider architecture review.
Finally, we opened up discussion to all attendees to ask any questions they might have about the platform. We talked about how the identity mapping service maintains links between different entities, and the benefits of being able to substitute different modules within the BDE infrastructure for different purposes.
You can find a recording of the webinar on YouTube, and view all the slides on Slideshare.