Knowledge Driven Drug Discovery goes Semantic

While the availability of freely accessible information sources relevant to medicinal chemistry and drug discovery has grown over the past few years, the knowledge management challenges of this data have also grown enormously: how to get consistent answers, how to manage different interfaces, how to judge data quality, and how to combine and overlay the data to generate new knowledge. Open PHACTS (Open Pharmaological Concept Triple Store), a consortium of 22 partners, is poised to address this knowledge management challenge with semantic web technology to accelerate drug discovery. Here we describe the brief rationale, history and approach of the OpenPHACTS consortium with a final aim to create an Open Pharmacological Space (OPS).