Evaluating the disparity between active areas of biomedical research and the global burden of disease employing Linked Data and data-driven discovery

Although biomedical research has brought substantial benefit to people all over the world, by dramatically improving their life expectancy and the quality of life, the distribution of this benefit is not equitable. An important contributor to this is the current absence of accurate, interlinked data and information that enables a precise description of the degree of inequality between current efforts in biomedical research and global health care needs. In this position paper we present an approach for evaluating this disparity, which involves converting and inter-linking relevant datasets into Linked Data, and analyzing them to represent the disparity as a visual map. We identify different data sets, relevant for answering the research question. Since bio-medical statistical data is of paramount importance in this data integration project, we describe a tool and methodology of representing such bio-medical statistical data as RDF. We perform an preliminary integration of the datasets and outline how prospective queries can be formulated. We conclude by discussing the limitations of the approach taking the current bio-medical data curation landscape into account.