Semantic web standards: Legal and social issues and implications

Abstract

Bioinformatics represents a paradigm shift in basic science research, requiring the interoperability of numerous diverse and distinct databases. The Semantic Web, through its standards, tools and languages, will give research labs, particularly bioinformatics labs, the ability to easily and automatically integrate across the varied biological databases. Although Berners-Lee eschewed proprietary standards in the creation of the Web, favoring royalty free standards, there are still numerous legal concerns with regard to the standard setting process, particularly implications for antitrust and intellectual property law. This chapter will describe the social process of creating standards within academic science, and outline some of the legal concerns -particularly related to antitrust and intellectual property issues, making some suggestions that might assist the regulation of difficulties of a legal nature in standardizing data and prevent a legal morass from arising out creating and setting standards for the Semantic Web.