Dr. Paolo Ciccarese

Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School
Assistant in Neuroscience at Massachusetts General Hospital
Senior Information Scientist, MGH Biomedical Informatics Core
Co-chair of the W3C Open Annotation Community Group

After researching in the field of clinical information systems and clinical decision support, Paolo’s current main focus consists in enabling personal and community-driven scientific knowledge acquisition, curation and sharing. Neuroscience is the main area of interest, but the same methods and tools are also applied to other disciplines. Paolo co-developed the SWAN platform [1] focusing on scientific discourse representation in Alzheimer's Disease research and is now exploring the use of Annotation of digital resources for supporting the knowledge creation process. Paolo is the author of the Annotation Ontology [2], an RDF model for exchanging annotation. He currently co-chairs the W3C Open Annotation Community Group [3] with the purpose of working towards a common, RDF-based, specification for annotating digital resources. Paolo is the architect of the Domeo Annotation Toolkit [4, 5] an extensible web application enabling users to visually create and share ontology-based stand-off annotation on HTML documents. Paolo architected and co-developed the CATCH (Common Annotation, Tagging, and Citation) a unified public open API that will enable storing, searching, discovering, sharing and analyzing scholarly annotations produced on four digital media types - text, image, audio and video - across existing pedagogical and research tools at Harvard. CATCH has been integrated with the Harvard MOOC (HarvardX) and successfully used for collecting students annotations on poetry. Paolo is currently developing the Annotopia Annotation Hub that consists of a generalization of CATCH for annotating any identifiable content, including scientific data.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18583197
[2] http://www.jbiomedsem.com/content/2/S2/S4
[3] http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/
[4] http://www.jbiomedsem.com/content/3/S1/S1
[5] http://annotationframework.org/

Elaine Collier

Dr. Collier is a physician scientist who serves as Senior Advisor to the Director at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). Dr. Collier engages with diverse partners and communities, including patients, healthcare providers, academics, industry, and other government agencies to promote innovation across the translational spectrum.  Previously, Dr. Collier served as interim director of the NCATS Clinical and Translation Science Award program.  Dr. Collier also spearheaded an NIH program for discovery of scientists and resources for interdisciplinary collaboration that fostered expansion of research networking platforms and tools using linked open data.