The World Wide Web Consortium on Tuesday announced formation of the Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group, which is to deploy standardized Semantic Web specifications to provide services defined by the user community. Looking to overcome obstacles to data sharing in the life science research and health services communities, W3C seeks a framework supporting semantically rich system, process, and information interoperability.

According to W3C, embedding of semantics into medical and research information will offer better access to information needed to find cures for diseases, make drugs safer and more affordable, and enable health care providers to offer individualized clinical management.

The interest group will develop use cases that demonstrate the value of adopting Semantic Web technology, core vocabularies and ontologies, guidelines, and best practices, W3C said. Also, the group will work with other Semantic Web-related groups on plans for future development.

Best practices are expected from the group within a year. The interest group will be chaired by Tonya Hongsermeier, who is affiliated with Partners HealthCare, and Eric Neumann, who is described by W3C as unaffiliated.

The Semantic Web is a concept that involves incorporating descriptions into data on the Web to make the data reusable and enable applications to be built that can take advantage of this describable collection of data, according to W3C spokesperson Janet Daly. It features a common framework for data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries, W3C said.