Vocabulary Services Initiative

"One change would make a substantial difference [to drug R&D]: the creation of agreed-upon standards for digitally representing drug assets." This proposal by Bonabeau, Bingham, and Aaron was one the Harvard Business Review's ten "breakthrough ideas" for 2010. New R&D business models demand successful integration of heterogeneous data from multiple providers and scientific domains. Yet a chaotic terminological landscape has made data and the vocabularies used to describe content hard to find, share, correlate, and integrate--and expensive for individual companies to maintain.

The vocabulary services initiative aims to realise a new environment where project teams are unhindered fromusing data from whichever partners they choose to engage with and any electronic systems they wish to interrogate. Precompetitive development of open research vocabularies will benefit information producers and consumers by enabling them to

• Share the development effort and cost of vocabulary production and maintenance
• Reduce redundacy and provide greater coverage of more concepts
• Better represent scientific domains and language differences by drawing on a wide body of global subject-matter experts
• Spend more time exploiting and less time "plumbing"
• Make outsourcing and collaborative business models more efficient

See the paper published in Drug Discovery Today to learn more about the need for shared services around vocabularies. VSI is currently seeking funding to recruit a qualified consultancy to review vocabulary activities in life sciences R&D and identify areas to either assist ongonig work or develop specific Pistoia activities to address urgent needs.