BMC bioinformatics has released a special issue supplement on the Semantic e-science for biomedicine. It contain six papers on “the-state-of-the-art”  concerning the use of semantic web technologies in the life-sciences or biomedicine.   The topics covered range from modelling networks and pathways to,  intriguingly “traditional Chinese Medicine”.

One of the papers Advancing translational medicine research with the semantic web presents an overview of the W3C Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG).  This paper describes the work of HCLSIG and a use-case example covering the achievements as well as the future directions of the group. Unlike many “Semantic Web” papers I have read before it presents a well grounded view of the technologies and challenges of the semantic web in biomedince and does not proclaim to solve the bio-data problem by applying a new set of technologies to the issues.