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Also not part of the original charter was the work the group did on the Cool URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers). "It's an area that a lot of people care about," says Stephens. She says she's heard many times from people who wanted an overview of good practices around URIs.

"URIs so important to the semantic web, but people are scared about them and they don't know how to start. I think the document's going to go a long way toward defining best practices for URIs based upon the best of today's thinking," Stephens says.

The high-level paper, Business Case for Semantic Web Technologies, which came out in the closing days of the group, is also a useful tool for explaining to senior managers why they should be thinking about the semantic web. When Stephens switched positions to take a role at Eli Lilly, it was clear that the use cases, case studies and the semantic web FAQ document the group put together were useful to her new employer. "They're very interested in seeing what other people in health care domains are doing, and they're also very interested in reading case studies as to how NASA and others are using the technology," she says.

These days, Stephens is also the proposed chair for the renewing Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group. The semantic web is important to that community for a number of reasons, says Stephens. That includes drug discovery, where there's generally a strong need to be able to integrate many heterogeneous sources of data together -- sources of data that may change much more frequently than they would in a lot of other industries -- especially at a time when the industry is under pressure to bring more drugs to market.

"This business needs to get better at what they are doing, so they are more interested in exploring cutting-edge technologies than some others might be," she says. An advantage is that scientists in this realm have been working with the Gene ontology since the 90s to better understand their data, and that biological data is often presented in the form of a network, so they're very comfortable with the semantic web's graphical data model.

The semantic web can also be a boon to a scientific community that has to deal with its legacy past, in which it was one of the leading industries to early on publish data sources, collections, and gene information publicly on the web. "Because so many of them started to use [the web] early on, there's not one central resource. There were lots of groups posting their own data and formats in their own way," she says. "All of that data needs to be brought together and not into a relational data model."

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