In the July issue of Molecular Systems Biology (4 , Article number: 201 doi:10.1038/msb.2008.39; 2008), Jonathan A Sagotsky et al. in their article "Life Sciences and the web: a new era for collaboration, write:

The World Wide Web has revolutionized how researchers from various disciplines collaborate over long distances. This is nowhere more important than in the Life Sciences, where interdisciplinary approaches are becoming increasingly powerful as a driver of both integration and discovery. Data access, data quality, identity, and provenance are all critical ingredients to facilitate and accelerate these collaborative enterprises and it is here where Semantic Web technologies promise to have a profound impact. This paper reviews the need for, and explores advantages of as well as challenges with these novel Internet information tools as illustrated with examples from the biomedical community.

The community websites examined by the authors have different applications, but they are all facilitating web-based collaborative biomedical research, education and outreach. Connecting and integrating the ever-growing amount of biomedical data, and combining them with cutting-edge analytical services, remains a significant challenge. The authors consider that the semantic web has great potential, but faces hurdles for widespread adoption, not least of which is the difficulty of funding its development until it gets to the point where it has demonstrated value in the life sciences and in other contexts.