By Bosse Andersson
The first LarKC Pharma workshop was held in Stuttgart April 19 and 20. An interesting mix of participants from pharmaceutical companies, semantic web companies and research/academia formed an open atmosphere with many intense discussions and hopefully future interactions.

The workshop had an outline similar to previous LarKC tutorials with a twist from the pharma domain in presentations and examples.

Participants did find the LarKC platform and the Linked Life Data repository useful;

  • From pharma perspective questions circulated around what the requirements will be for us to host/use LarKC as an internal experimental platform.
  • The semantic web companies where more interested in how to use components of LarKC or provide services that can leverage from the LarKC platform. 
  • The research/academia community had a specific need to learn how to quickly get LarKC up and running for the first iteration in the Innovative Medicine Initiative, OpenPhacts.

Many questions did come up during lively discussions, some were answered others will be brought back to the consortium to address, e. g. how to lower the entrance to start using LarKC.