Biomedical Science in the Net of the 21st Century:
Discovering Emergent Properties of Everyday Life
Bruce Schatz, schatz@uiuc.edu,
Head, Department of Medical Information Science
Professor, Institute for Genomic Biology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The Net is the global network, which enables users worldwide to interact
with information. As such, it provides the base functionality for the
information infrastructure for biomedical science. The Evolution of the
Net has already proceeded from data transmission in the Internet to
information retrieval in the Web. This talk projects the trends in
information infrastructure and their application to biomedical science.
Model examples are given from large research projects led by the speaker,
supporting complex systems in biology with third wave technology and
complex systems in medicine with fourth wave technology. Waves of the Net
evolve towards capturing the structures of everyday life with continuous
features and clustering vectors to discover useful patterns.
The global protocols are evolving towards knowledge navigation in the
Interspace, moving from syntax to semantics. In the short-term future,
the protocols will support analysis, for interactive correlations across
knowledge sources. Analysis environments will directly support
scientific discovery from community knowledge, by providing biomedical
scientists with semantic federation across distributed collections. In
the long-term future, the protocols will move beyond semantics to
pragmatics. Feature vectors relating to all aspects of human health will
be universally available for whole populations at the level of individual
persons. Becoming one with all the world’s knowledge can be achieved via
discovering emergent properties within the feature vectors of the Net.