@gmod/jbrowse/website/blog/2012-09-07-rbuels-and-jbrowse-at-the-semantic-web-biohackathon-2012-index.md

JBrowse - client-side genome browser

---
layout: post
title: @rbuels and JBrowse at the Semantic Web BioHackathon 2012
date: 2012-09-07
tags: ["Development"]
---

I had the great honor of being invited to the [BioHackathon 2012](BioHackathon 2012), held this past week in Toyama, Japan and funded by Japan's National Bioscience Database Center ([NBDC](http://biosciencedbc.jp/?lng=en)) and Database Center for Life Science ([DBCLS](http://dbcls.rois.ac.jp/en/)).  It's been an exhausting week of immersing myself in Semantic Web technologies: RDF, [SPARQL](http://www.w3.org/TR/sparql11-query/), [SADI](http://sadiframework.org), and lots and lots of ontologies.  A lot of work still needs to be done, but there really are revolutionary capabilities coming to bioinformatics from this direction.

At the hackathon, I worked on a SPARQL-based data backend for JBrowse, which will be released as part of the upcoming JBrowse 1.7.0.  It is shaping up to be surprisingly fluid, especially given the less-than-speedy reputation of today's triple stores.

Until it is merged into master, work on the JBrowse triple store can be seen at [https://github.com/GMOD/jbrowse/compare/master...triplestore](https://github.com/GMOD/jbrowse/compare/master...triplestore)