Cognitive Software Group — Coronavirus: ten lost years for AI

Semantics in Medical Research

The seminal Cancergrid project was a collaboration between five UK universities: Cambridge (specializing in oncology), Oxford (software engineering), University College London (semantic modelling), Birmingham (clinical trials management), and Belfast (telemedicine). It was funded in the first instance for three years from 2005 by the UK Medical Research Council. Oxford University and the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute continued the work when the original project ended in 2008. Microsoft Research had involvement in 2011 to 2012.

The project was initiated in order to “address the twin problems of interoperability between incompatible software systems and generativity in clinical trials” to inform next generation approaches, taking a model-driven approach to the development of trials management tools.

The CancerGrid approach addressed the two problems of data integration and tool generation, via the collection and management of metadata in the first case, and model-driven engineering in the second — improving the science through greater effectiveness, and reducing drudgery through greater efficiency.

It concluded as follows

“… there is growing recognition that the large-scale sharing and integration of data from dynamic, heterogeneous sources requires computable representations of the semantics of data, and it is here that a significant part of the challenge…