Dr T. N. Bhat

NIST/CSTL
100 Bureau Drive
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8313

Biography:

Dr. Bhat’s areas of research interests are X-ray crystallography, chemical ontology, data validation and data annotation, software development, bioinformatics, AIDS research and Semantic Web. At present, Dr. Bhat is a project leader for the bioinformatics efforts at the Biochemical Science Division of NIST. He is the author of over 80 refereed scientific articles. These publications have received over 8000 scientific citations and it is one of the top hits among the scientific publications from NIST. He was a key person who established the RCSB Protein Data Bank (http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/). Some of his recent database efforts are - AIDS database (HIVSDB) at NIST, http://xpdb.nist.gov/hivsdb/hivsdb.html and re-engineered an existing database (http://xpdb.nist.gov/enzyme_thermodynamics/ ) and http://bioinfo.nist.gov/hmpd/

Talk Title: Semantic Web for Chemical Images by T. N. Bhat and J. Barkley

Abstract: There is considerable interest in the Semantic Web as a solution to the growing information technology needs of images. However, the progress towards this vision has been very limited. One reason for this slow progress is the difficulty in understanding and applying the concepts of Semantic Web technology to a real-world problem using a rule-based system to name images. For this reason, though our ultimate goal is to develop a Semantic web technology for images, here we illustrate the concept of Semantic Web technology for chemical images for which we have developed a rule-based naming system. The ontological vocabulary of chemical images is developed using the commonly asked questions during a drug design effort. Drug design is a collective and coordinated effort involving several disciplines such as structural biology and medicinal chemistry. The semantics, chemical taxonomies, used by these disciplines may differ from one another. Several semantic representations of the views commonly used by these disciplines will be reviewed and their utilization in developing a chemical Semantic Web will be illustrated. The chemical ontology developed by us may be viewed at (http://xpdb.nist.gov/hiv2_d/advanced_query_files/slide0002.htm ). The use of this Semantic Web concept to exchange information between three major independently maintained databases; HIVSDB, the PDB, AIDSDB and PubChem will be illustrated. The OWL models for AIDS inhibitors are available for download at the (http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLS/ChemicalTaxonomiesUseCase).