Cooking soup on a stone in Cambridge

In December 2015 a number of devoted Semantic Web enthusiasts, working in the area of life sciences, gathered in Cambridge for a two day conference, preceded by a day with tutorials and followed by a one day Hackathon.

In an old English folktale some travellers came to a village where they were not very well greeted. They were hungry but the villagers did not offer them anything to eat. The travellers then asked for at least a pot with water to cook soup on a stone and that was given to them. Curious as the villagers where they came to look at the miracle, cooking a soup on a stone, and soon they brought some extra ingredients to make the soup even more delicious. In the end the entire village had contributed and everyone where invited to the soup festivities and everyone enjoyed it very much.

In the same way as in the folktale the semantic web community strives to bring their data to the global village in an open and connected way. If we are able to combine the wisdom, now hidden in separate silos around the world we could make the combined wisdom much greater than the sum. If we share data in an open and collaborative atmosphere 2+2 might very well be much bigger than 4!

The SWAT4LS conference is an annual conference which is now on its 8th year. Next year the conference will be in Amsterdam. It would be very nice if also the Uppsala Monitoring Centre as a global actor could contribute to the agenda with ideas and data, bringing also global drug safety wisdom to the soup!