2013 was an excellent year for our biobanking blog readership and we sincerely appreciate your support. We are truly excited about our future posts and look forward to your continued readership. In appreciation of your continued support, here are the top 5 most popular biobanking articles of 2013. Let us know which one is your favorite and make sure to check back in next week for our first biobanking article of 2014.
#5. Six Points Along the Ontology Spectrum
This is the first post in our data modeling series. Today we give a broad perspective for different ways to represent knowledge and data. Some of our posts have talked about ontologies, controlled vocabularies, data models, and other kinds of knowledge representation. All of these share some commonalities, and exist along the Ontology (or sometimes Semantic) Spectrum.
#4. Three Languages Your Biobank Can Speak - Exploring Controlled Vocabularies
Previously, we discussed the mandate for using data standards in biobanking. Here we will show how biomedical controlled vocabularies, a kind of consensus data standard, are used to improve data quality and interoperability.Data interoperability standards, eg HL7 and the the ISO 11179 Common Data Element (CDE) standard make use of controlled vocabularies.
#3. Five Lessons Learned on Developing the Future of Personalized Medicine
The future of optimal health and cost effective, efficient care is dependent on the development of personalized medicine. Historically, scientific discovery and delivery of care has been developed from a one dimensional view of patients that assumed all individuals with a disease are the same – a one size fits all diagnosis and treatment regime which, over the past several decades, has failed to produce superior therapies and health outcomes.
#2. Four Good Reasons Why Data Standards Matter to Biobanking
A Biobank refers to any organized collection of biological material that once was either part of a living organism or produced by it. While this blog post focuses on the human biospecimen repositories, the fundamental principles discussed are relevant for many if not most other biobank types. Furthermore the terms specimen, biospecimen and sample are used interchangeably.
#1. Four Reasons Why Semantics Help Make Biobanks Better
The Semantic Web provides a means to link information on the web to each other and to things in real life in an interoperable way. Internationalized Resource Identifiers, of which URLs are a type, are used to identify nearly everything, and linked data makes it possible to visit those URLs to get more information about the things they represent. This has some very useful applications, especially in biobanking. Semantics was literally made for biomedical research, and here are four ways in which that relationship can help make biobanks better information resources.
