SWAN: A distributed knowledge infrastructure for Alzheimer disease research

SWAN – a Semantic Web Application in Neuromedicine – is a project to develop an effective, integrated scientific knowledge infrastructure for the Alzheimer Disease (AD) research community, using the energy and self-organization of that community, enabled by Semantic Web technology. This infrastructure may later be deployed for research communities in other neuromedical disorders. SWAN incorporates the full biomedical research knowledge lifecycle in its ontological model, including support for personal data organization, hypothesis generation, experimentation, lab data organization, and digital pre-publication collaboration. Community, laboratory, and personal digital resources may all be organized and interconnected using SWAN’s common semantic framework.