Facilitating Data Curation: a Solution Developed in the Toxicology Domain

Abstract

Toxicology aims to understand the adverse effects of chemical compounds or physical agents on living organisms. For chemicals, much information regarding safety testing of cosmetic ingredients is now scattered in a plethora of safety evaluation reports. Toxicologists in our university intend to collect this information into a single repository. Their current approach uses spreadsheets, does not scale well, and makes data curation and querying cumbersome. Semantic technologies (e.g., RDF, OWL, and Linked Data principles) would be more appropriate for this purpose. However, this technology is not very accessible to toxicologists without extensive training. In this paper, we report on a tool that supports subject matter experts in the construction of an RDF-based knowledge base for the toxicology domain. The tool is using the jigsaw metaphor for guiding the subject matter experts. We demonstrate that the jigsaw metaphor is a viable option for generating RDF. Future work includes investigating appropriate methods and tools for knowledge evolution and data analysis.