There is a tremendous change in the amount of electronic data available to us and the manner in which we use it. With the on going “Big Data” movement we are facing the challenge of data “volume, variety and velocity.” The linked data movement and semantic web technologies try to address the issue of data variety. The current demand for advanced data analytics and services have triggered the shift from data services to knowledge services and delivery platforms. Semantics plays a major role in providing richer and more comprehensive knowledge services.
We need a stable, sustainable, scalable and verifiable framework for knowledge-based semantic services. We also need a way to validate the “semantic” nature of such services using this framework. Just having a framework is not enough. The usability of this framework should be tested with a good example of a semantic service as a case study in a key research domain. The thesis addresses two research problems.
Problem 1: A generalized framework for the development of end-to-end semantic services needs to be established.
The thesis proposes such a framework that provides architecture for developing end–to–end semantic services and metrics for measuring its semantic nature.
Problem 2: To implement a robust knowledge based service using the architecture proposed by the semantic service framework and its semantic nature can be validated using the proposed framework.
ResearchIQ, a semantic search portal for resource discovery in the biomedical research domain, has been implemented. It is intended to serve as the required case study for testing the framework. The architecture of the system follows the design principles of the proposed framework.
The ResearchIQ system is truly semantic from end-to-end. The baseline evaluation metrics of the said framework are used to prove this claim. Several key data sources have been integrated in the first version of the ResearchIQ system. It serves as a framework for semantic data integration in the biomedical domain. It can be used as a platform for development and support of a variety of semantic services and applications in the biomedical domain.
A large part of this thesis is devoted to the details regarding the ResearchIQ project. The document is intended as a report of the ResearchIQ project as a successful implementation of an end-to-end semantic framework.