Susie Stephens

Dr Susie Stephens joined Oracle in 2002 to lead the development of the Database, Application Server and Collaboration Suite. This was developed to further enhance Oracle's capabilities as a powerful infrastructure platform and as an analytical engine for drug discovery. As a result, she was heavily involved in the implementation of an RDF data model in the latest release of the Oracle Database.

Dr Stephens now guides Oracle in its continued adoption of Semantic Web technologies, and represents Oracle in discussions with W3C regarding standards in this area. She has presented at a number of Semantic Web conferences, including RuleML 2005 and Semantic Technologies 2006. She has written articles on the Semantic Web that have been published in IEEE Intelligent Systems and Current Opinions in Drug Discovery and Development.

Dr Stephens worked at Sun Microsystems for many years prior to joining Oracle.

Synopsis

The Integration of Biological Data Using Semantic Web Technologies

The life sciences have a rich history of making data available on the Web, because scientific researchers recognized the benefits of sharing data and made it available to other researchers for the benefit of greater science. However, integration of the disparate biological data sets has proven to be a challenge because different identifier schemes, inconsistent terminology, and multiple data formats have been used. Further, advances in scientific knowledge require regular changes to be made to the underlying data models, thereby compounding the challenges. Semantic Web technologies provide the ability to more easily aggregate such data, thus enabling scientists to more easily gain biological insight. This presentation will describe Oracle's support for the Semantic Web, and will describe real-world implementations of the technology.