Biotech Startups Join Linux Foundation

*Life Sciences Information Framework OpenBEL to Become a Linux Foundation
Collaborative Project*



*New project will accelerate collaboration on OpenBEL, the open platform
for capturing, integrating, storing and sharing biological knowledge in and
across organizations*



SAN FRANCISCO, August 26, 2013 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit
organization dedicated to open source development and technologies, today
announced OpenBEL is now a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.



OpenBEL is an open source software project that enables users to capture,
store, share and leverage life sciences content through a knowledge
engineering platform. In life sciences, data collection is not the problem;
making information interoperable and actionable has proven to be more
challenging. OpenBEL aims to address those challenges.



Selventa released OpenBEL as an open source project in June 2012 after
successfully using it for more than 10 years to better understand drug
efficacy and toxicity, identify mechanisms for drug sensitivity and
resistance, and provide deeper insight into disease networks using multiple
types of Big Data. Since then it has been used in research by other
companies, research organizations, and universities, including AstraZeneca, The
Fraunhofer Institute, Harvard Medical School, Novartis, Pfizer, and
University of California at San Diego, among others. Foundation Medicine is
also joining OpenBEL to advance its mission to bring comprehensive cancer
genomic analysis to routine clinical care.



Distinctly different industries are all looking to take advantage of the
collaborative development model to accelerate and advance software. Through
its Collaborative Projects services, The Linux Foundation provides the
essential collaborative and organizational framework so projects can focus
on innovation and results. OpenBEL will tap into more than a decade of
expertise that The Linux Foundation has in forming and shepherding
successful open source projects, including Linux, in hopes that it can
parlay that knowledge into a thriving open source project and community
that will lead to medical and scientific breakthroughs.



In biotechnology and life sciences, the use of OpenBEL and its standard way
of expressing information can accelerate the pace of technology innovation
and scientific discovery in areas such as network visualization of neural
brain function; understanding of complex inter-related disease biology;
comparison of human diseases with various animal models; deep investigation
of drug efficacy and toxicity; as well as development of innovative
therapeutics and diagnostics for personalized healthcare.



The OpenBEL project advances these disciplines with the use of a common
Biological Expression Language (BEL) that represents scientific findings in
a computable form by capturing causal and correlative relationships in
context. It also includes the BEL framework, an open platform designed to
capture, integrate and store knowledge within an organization and with its
partners. Central to the design of the framework is the ability to
integrate knowledge across different representational vocabularies and
ontologies. This allows organizations to combine knowledge from disparate
sources into centralized knowledge repositories. The combined knowledge can
be made available to a variety of decision support and analytical
applications through a standardized set of computable networks and APIs.



“All of us are smarter collectively than any one of us is by ourselves, and
Linux is one of the greatest examples of that principle. We are able to
take what we know about Linux and collaborative development and transfer
that to new industries,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux
Foundation. “OpenBEL represents an amazing opportunity for openness and
collaboration to advance science, and we’re happy to impart our knowledge
of collaborative software development to leaders in the life sciences
industry. Successful open source projects don’t just host code; they make
use of a full suite of open source best practices to quickly gain adoption
and collaboration. We aim to help OpenBEL achieve even more success.”



“The Linux Foundation hosts the largest collaborative project in the
history of computing: Linux. It is the standard by which all open
development projects measure themselves. We know our industry can learn a
lot from this neutral steward of open development and governance,” said Ted
Slater, Project lead for OpenBEL. “Also by hosting OpenBEL at The Linux
Foundation, we have access to a variety of important services to help
facilitate collaborative development, allowing our teams to focus on our
subject matter: life science.”



The OpenBEL project includes the BEL language, the open source code and
builds of the BEL Framework and associated technologies, tools, and
content. The Technical Steering chair is currently Professor Dr. Martin
Hofmann-Apitius, head of the Department of Bioinformatics at the Fraunhofer
Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI) in Sankt Augustin
(Germany), a governmental nonprofit research institute.



For more information about the OpenBEL project and to get involved, please
visit: http://www.openbel.org



For more information about Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects, please
visit: http://collabprojects.linuxfoundation.org/



*About The Linux Foundation*

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the
growth of Linux and collaborative software development. Founded in 2000,
the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and
promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system and
collaborative software development by marshaling the resources of its
members and the open source community. The Linux Foundation provides a
neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Collaborative
Projects, Linux conferences, including LinuxCon, and generating original
research and content that advances the understanding of Linux and
collaborative software development. More information can be found at
www.linuxfoundation.org.





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*Trademarks: The Linux Foundation, Linux Standard Base, MeeGo, Tizen, and
Yocto Project are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark
of Linus Torvalds**.** OpenDaylight Project is a trademark of the
OpenDaylight Project, Inc.** OpenBEL is a trademark of the OpenBEL
Consortium, Inc. Other trademarks and copyrights are owned by their
respective owners.***