Semantic 'lego': an information framework to drive drug discovery.

"A new consortium of European organisations unite to support next generation drug discovery by providing a single view across data sources, bringing the semantic web to drug discovery. The Open PHACTS consortium, funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative, will reduce the barriers to drug discovery by applying semantic technologies to available data resources, creating an Open Pharmacological Space. Currently, pharmaceutical companies expend significant and duplicated efforts aligning and integrating internal information with public data sources. This process is largely incompatible with massive computational approaches and the vast majority of drug discovery sources cannot easily interoperate. Open PHACTS (the Open Pharmacological Concepts Triple Store) will deliver a single view across available data resources, and will be freely available to users. Scientific text, difficult to analyse by computer, will have factual assertions extracted as semantic triples, allowing for the first time the prospect of querying textual and database data together to give answers needed to identify new drug targets and pharmacological interactions...."